But then Donald Drumpf swallowed his soul and spat it back out on TV, and I realized that even bullying villains can feel pain. Watch Christie’s eyes in this short video, and read this tale of shame.
This is what happens when petty, small-minded corruption meets a vaster, more fatuous corruption.
dianne says
I used to work in NJ and I don’t feel in the least sorry for Christie. I’m ready to see him suffer more, thank you very much. He deserves every bit of the humiliation that Trump gives him and more. I just hope that karma gets around to humiliating Trump as he deserves too.
dianne says
Chris Christie sold his soul and tried to sell the souls of his constituents as well. Don’t expect me to feel sorry for him because he didn’t get a good price for it.
themadtapper says
Well that just made my morning.
redwood says
Trump is a a runaway train following its one-track mind. Roaring along, it leaves souls twisting in the wind of its passage.
LykeX says
If Trump wins, this time next year all Americans will have that look.
Reginald Selkirk says
The message in those eyes is: “This is how much I hate Marco Rubio. I will endorse Trump, who will hopefully lose the general election to Hillary, and Marco Rubio will have to find another job, perhaps endorsing Rogaine.”
marcoli says
There is much written and said about the silent scream in his eyes, but to me that is more about people projecting their interpretations into what they want Christie to be feeling. It is just as likely that he was simply thinking about looking alert and stern, and it just projects like ‘oh, shit, what have I done?’ I don’t think we can read reliably read expressions all the time.
If Trump gets the nomination there will be many republican party leaders who will throw their support behind him for the sake of projecting party unity. I have been hearing commentary from various party bigwigs to that effect. Assuming that is so, then Christies’ ill-considered move will be forgotten.
cervantes says
Why should I feel sorry for him? He asked to be there.
Menyambal says
“Trumpery” is an archaic word for things with flashy appearance but no substantial value. I think now is a good time to bring it back.
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says
re @1:
totally in agreement. Christie is such a bully that he deserves his moment of regret. Like I said earlier, elsewhere, I see Christie’s eyes as sizing up that ‘sack of hammers’ (with that stawberry mousse topping) to be his next snack.
Saganite, a haunter of demons says
Huh? Why feel sorry? If this is the price he’s willing to pay for a small chance of more power, then that’s his choice. The article was funny to read, but nobody forces Christie to sell his soul. That’s his own ambition at work.
raven says
To be fair, Christie didn’t get much for his soul. OTOH, his soul was so dark, shriveled up, and small, it wasn’t worth much.
laurentweppe says
Remember that bullies start their takeover by going after the kids nobody likes: saying “Donald forced Jeb to run home in tears to mom and made Chris his personal bitch? Who care, both of them are douche anyway!” is great way to make one forgets that Donal will eventually start beating them up
laurentweppe says
Remember that bullies start their takeover by going after the kids nobody likes: saying “Donald forced Jeb to run home in tears to mom and made Chris his personal bitch? Who care, both of them are douche anyway!” is great way to make one forgets that Donal will eventually start beating them up
laurentweppe says
mmmm test test?
laurentweppe says
Yep, there’s something wrong with the posting of comments, has there been a been an obscenity filter installed on the comment section? Okay, I’ll try again:
Ahem
Remember that bullies start their takeover by going after the kids nobody likes: saying “Donald forced Jeb to run home in tears to mom and made Chris his personal bitch? Who care, both of them are jerks anyway!” is great way to make one forgets that Donal will eventually start beating them up
laurentweppe says
Okay, has there been an obscenity filter installed on the comment section?
Remember that bullies start their takeover by going after the kids nobody likes: saying “Donald forced Jeb to run home in tears to mom and made Chris his personal chew toy? Who care, both of them are jerks anyway!” is a great way to make one forgets that Donald will eventually start beating them up
blf says
laurentweppe@14, I have had some recent problems with “obscenity” as well (as far as I know, in quoting from a Grauniad article), albeit to his credit, poopyhead did approve a somewhat-bowdlerized version.
It’s easy to feel sorry for Christie — which does not mean in any way approving or condoning his ideas — his vision of facist utopia has been usurped by a different vision of facist utopia. I feel so sorry for Christie I might suggest that he not be the first thrown in the boiling lava pit.
(The mildly deranged penguin points out the problem with chucking Christie into a pit of boiling lava is he’d probably extinguish the volcano, and suggests rocketing him into a supermassive black hole is more reliable.)
aziraphale says
That’s a fine piece by Alexandra Petri. T. S. Eliot and Harlan Ellison on the same page, not something you see every day.
laurentweppe says
Why do your penguin hate black holes so much?
numerobis says
laurentweppe@14: “a great way to make one forgets that Donald will eventually start beating them up”
One can hold two ideas simultaneously in one’s head: that Christie deserves no compassion, and that Trunp is awful.
numerobis says
As for launching Christie into a black hole, the orbital dynamics make that essentially impossible: you need to hit the black hole precisely, any slight deviation and you merely get the spacecraft to get close and then flung back out at relativistic speeds as a cloud of atoms.
Also, the nearest black hole is millions of light-years away.
blf says
(You’ve got it backwards, upside down, reversed, and even mistaken: She’s not my penguin, she is the Supreme Overlord Ruler and Cheese-eater of All the Multiverses for All Entirety. And likes MUSHROOMS!)
She doesn’t actually “hate” black holes per se, but does think they are lazy, just lying about swallowing whatever falls into them, instead of actively hunting down and shallowing Christies and trum-prats and peas.
blf says
This is an advantage.
Nate Carr says
Can we please not?
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says
re 21 et al:
(tsssk, I’ll go there) the nearest black hole is in NJ, the governor of that state, and was showing his disappointment face as Trump resisted being swallowed by his overwhelming gravitational pull.
moarscienceplz says
Half of America will have that look. The other half will be issued jagged swords and black cloaks with a red eye painted on them.
blf says
They’ll backstab and eat each other?
moarscienceplz says
blf
One can only hope.
frog says
I honestly don’t see any desperation or horror or whatever in Christie’s eyes. Vacant, maybe.
I see someone who is thinking about something else entirely, something trivial. A guy who isn’t paying any attention to the boring blowhard at the lectern, but just trying to keep an appropriately serious expression while he thinks about the list of three things he has to pick up at the store on the way home from this shindig.
anym says
Cygnus X1 isn’t super massive, but it is probably a black hole. Only about 6000 lightyears away, too. There are probably closer ones, but no-one is quite certain yet.
timgueguen says
Christie’s expression generated a lot of tweets. One of them was along the lines that Christie should blink once for yes and twice for no if he was being held hostage by the Trump campaign.
DLC says
Christie now knows what Sauruman felt after joining forces with Sauron, only to have the Ents rip his stronghold to pieces.
On a more serious note : IMO Christie was disassociating from the events going on around him in order to make it through the night with a more or less straight face.
Matt G says
Maybe what LIGO detected was not the merging of two distant black holes, but the subsumption of Christie by Trump.
Holms says
What an empty news item. “Chris Christie looks slightly glum during Trump stump” – empty fucking noise, yet it is everywhere. Don’t get caught up in the vapidity please.
Holms says
Oh, I overlooked Drumpf. Dear god, just no.
Alteredstory says
I sorta wonder if there’s a small part of him that worries he has helped usher in a period of American history that will be remembered like Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain.
Tethys says
Ah, body language. The rigid stance, the clenched jaw grimace, the eye’s doing the looking askance thing to whatever is being said. It pretty much screams his true feelings of contempt. A brief quote on the psychology
source
Electric Shaman says
Am I the only one who thought the Washington Post article by Ms Petri was horrendously written? It was just paragraph after paragraph of her saying the exact same thing with each new paragraph infusing a different pop culture reference in a desperate bid to show us all her cleverness. And the commas. All those commas!
If I am the only one then I will bid you all good day and show myself the door.
changerofbits says
@19
Already stated in @28, but there black holes much closer to earth than that. For instance, if A0620-00 is indeed a black hole, that’s roughly 3,000 light years away. At 1G acceleration, it would seem to Christie that the trip only took 15.5 years (remember, no need to slow back down) before being annihilated, meaning that he’ll probably still be alive when he gets there! I’m picturing some sort of virtual reality simulation (you know, where he can live out repeated fantasies screwing over his enemies, gaming the system, and brown nosing powerful people) and then with about a week left in the trip, the VR switches off so he has some time to contemplate his fate.
Nah, seeing his political career aspirations end go up in flames in front of our eyes is probably good enough for me.
magistramarla says
I just thought that the two of them looked like a couple of Mafia bosses.
vereverum says
On the bright side, during spagettification he will be thin again, though very tall.
unclefrogy says
@38
I had similar thoughts though I don’t think either them are top bosses, connected high-up clearly but not in charge.
so like Berlusconi,
Christie sold out years ago
uncle frogy
blgmnts says
@37:
But by the end he would (seem to) be massive (relative to everyone else, that is).
Marissa van Eck says
Can’t say I’m feelin’ too sorry for Christie right now. They can both go to Hell; I’m sure there’s a group rate for people who have done so much evil so well.
anchor says
No imagination. That eye-play can as easily be interpreted as him contemplating the repercussion of a threat by the duck to reveal something very nasty about the Governor which the duck’s empire discovered crawling under the ground, vis. “Either you endorse me or I will expose this juicy stuff I have on you.”