Does Gov. Chris "Tub o' Slime" Christie at least get a coupla points deducted for lying his putrid guts out?

Do the three fingers mean that the governor plans to tell only three lies, or that he's only telling three lies at this exact moment?

carte blanche n. Unrestricted power to act at one's own discretion; unconditional authority. [Fr.: carte, document + blanche, blank]

-- The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition

"Canceling the tunnel, then the largest public works project in the nation, helped shape Mr. Christie’s profile as a rising Republican star, an enforcer of fiscal discipline in a country drunk on debt. But the report is likely to revive criticism that his decision, which he said was about 'hard choices' in tough economic times, was more about avoiding the need to raise the state's gasoline tax, which would have violated a campaign promise."

-- from "Report Disputes Christie's Basis for
Halting Tunnel" by the NYT's Kate Zernike

by Ken

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey exaggerated when he declared that unforeseen costs to the state were forcing him to cancel the new train tunnel planned to relieve congested routes across the Hudson River, according to a long-awaited report by independent Congressional investigators.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey's share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.

-- from Kate Zernike's NYT report (see above)

Well, now, I think Kate is just being polite when she says that Governor Blimpo "exaggerated." The appropriate word here would be "lied." When you yammer about unforeseen costs, and all the known costs were already on the table, that's not an exaggeration, it's a lie, especially when you make up numbers that don't actually exist anywhere. "Misstated," in the third paragraph, seems more accurate -- a merely politer way of saying "lied."

What's more, it should be clear to anyone who recalls the brouhaha when the Blimp That Talks announced his astonishing reversal of the tunnel project, a potentially vital piece of additonal New York-New Jersey transport infrastructure, that those things that he exaggerated/misstated/lied about were in fact the pillars of his case for taking the drastic step.

Man, I could just spit!

It was just yesterday that I was talking, yet again, about the right-wing extremists' now-official unlimited License to LIe, drawing on testimony from Paul Krugman and James Surowiecki about the basic lyingness of Paul "You Don't Have to Choose Between a Crackpot and a Liar" Ryan's phony-baloney "deficit reduction" budget.

As Surowiecki pointed out in a New Yorker "Financial Page" column, "Call That a Budget?," "[T]he simple truth is that [Ryan's budget] plan is not an evenhanded attempt to solve America’s long-term budget problems. It’s a profoundly radical document, its proposals skewed by ideological biases."

Krugman, meanwhile, was exploring (in his NYT column "The Gullible Center") what he called "the Ryan phenomenon," curious not about the man ("a garden-variety modern G.O.P. extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class") but about "the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan -- and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can't seem to let go of their fantasy."

Well, our Paul (Paul K, that is) could with a minimum of effort produce a parallel column about "the Christie phenomenon," about the cult that has grown around the Karl Rove collaborator who, after just barely getting himself elected governor of New Jersey in a three-way race that included a deeply unpopular Democratic incumbent, quickly wangled his way into the political spotlight "as a rising Republican star, an enforcer of fiscal discipline in a country drunk on debt," as Kate Zernike puts it in her NYT report on the impending GAO report.

Between them, Ryan and Christie demonstrate how large an opening there is at present for a make-believe "icon of fiscal responsibility," engaging in the masquerade because (a) it plays well to gullible voters, and (b) it provides such fine cover for their actual radical right-wing agendas. Let's not forget how much mileage the Gasbag Governor got out of demonizing the public-employee unions he so cleverly and lyingly portrayed as What's Wrong With the Country -- a pack of lies that has been coming apart for the equally mendacious and extremist governors of Ohio and Wisconsin.

I don't think it's any stretch at all to apply to Governor Christie the logic that Krugman laid out yesterday for approval for Paul Ryan among the new wave of fake "centrists," who aren't really in the center of anything but have merely staked out some political turf as above-the-fray brokers between the unacceptable extremes. Krugman argued that their reason for existing depended on the possibility of, you know, responsibly splitting the difference.

The "centrists" needed to pretend that there are reasonable Republicans, so they nominated [Mr. Ryan, "an ordinary G.O.P. extremist, but a mild-mannered one"] for the role, crediting him with virtues he has never shown any sign of possessing. Indeed, back in 2010 Mr. Ryan, who has never once produced a credible deficit-reduction plan, received an award for fiscal responsibility from a committee representing several prominent centrist organizations."]

It's worth noting that the GAO report that brands Governor Gasbag as a liar was requested by NJ Sen. Frank Lautenberg. I think we need to give him credit for not simply accepting the heaps of bullshit the governor was dumping on an otherwise alarmingly acquiescent public. And on the basis of what we know about the report, please understand that we're not talking about a "difference of opinion," or even a "difference of emphasis." On the most basic issues solemnly thrust at us to defend his decision, he was simply lying. We know this now with 100 percent certainty.

Blimpo just assumed that the people, in the media as well as the general public, he was talking down to are low-grade morons who could be hornswoggled with his phony posture of fiscal rectitude, the pretense of being the Man Who Blew the Whistle on Decades of Left-Wing Largesse. If anyone can figure a way he didn't know that his entire announced rationale for pulling the plug on the tunnel was a tissue of fabrications, I'd love to hear it.

I suppose it's just a matter of time now before the overstuffed tool of the 1% (and its tools; I think he thinks of his "constituency" as being the white-collar criminal class that looks to fatten up on the trickled-down crumbs of the economic elites) pulls on those jumbo super-flame-retardant pants for a press conference at which he announces his resignation, on the ground that he's simply too dishonest to hold public office.


AND WHILE WE'RE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR
PHONY ICONS OF "FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY" . . .

Can we at least hope that, for example, when the Washington Post runs a story under the game-changingly dramatic-sounding headline "Health-care law will add $340 billion to deficit, new study finds," that a growing number of readers will take it for granted that with a minimum amount of knowledgeable poking around the new "study" -- by reality-based pokers, of course -- it will be revealed to be 99.9 percent lying bullshit?

Ah, it won't matter. By then all the licensed-to-lie lying liars of the Right-Wing Noise Machine will have adopted it as a fact that there's a "new study" that shows that the health-care law will add $340 billion to the deficit.

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