How exciting: Chris Christie put his name on the Republican presidential dance card. He’s No. 14.
The big man from New Jersey entered the race with all the chutzpah and hullaballoo that’s marked his five-and-a-half years as governor of the Garden State. In his carefully staged announcement speech, he said he’d be a truth-telling president.
“There is one thing you will know for sure,” he roared. “I say what I mean and I mean what I say.”
That’s swell, Chris. But when your campaign slogan is “Telling It Like It Is,” it would help if you weren’t infamous in your home state as an audacious, inveterate liar.
Tom Moran — who holds down the editorial page at New Jersey’s largest newspaper, The Star Ledger — felt a journalistic duty to warn America about Christie.
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“Don’t believe a word he says,” Moran wrote, pointing not to a few fibs and fabrications, but a lengthy “catalog” of an “over-the-top, hair-raising type of lies,” including these gems:
- Having assured public employees that their pensions were “sacred” to him, Christie then made cutting pensions a big priority.
- At a recent South Carolina gun rights meeting, Christie crowed that “no new [gun laws] have been made since I’ve been governor,” when in fact he’s enacted three gun-control measures.
- After he and his family racked up a $30,000 hotel bill during a luxurious weekend getaway at a Jordanian resort — one paid for by the king of Jordan — Christie claimed the junket wasn’t a violation of the state gift ban. How’s that? The governor and the king were personal friends, Christie said — although they’d only met once, in a brief encounter at a political dinner.
If politicians have to tell you that they’re truth-tellers, they’re probably not. So beware of Christie the compulsive liar. As Moran bluntly put it: “He’s a creep.”
