Indeed. That’s one reason it was a stupid thing to do.
It was, if that was the reasoning behind it. Which is not at all clear.
Well, no, it was a stupid thing to do no matter what the reasoning behind it. But it would be interesting to find out what exactly that reasoning was. I really doubt it was “to get the voters pissed off at the mayor”. It would be incredibly stupid to believe that that would be the end result. And as much as I dislike Christie, I don’t think either he or his top-level staffers are incredibly stupid.
If you believe the theory - the traffic jam wasn’t the point - the “traffic study” was. Those lane closures were going to be made permanent if they could justify it. Christie even was pondering aloud during one of the Press Conference why a place like Ft Lee needed three lanes. When you look at the map and everything - you could easily argue to justify it.
Remember - they weren’t closing the lanes - they were switching them to 95 thru traffic - so 95 got more and Ft Lee got less.
They were in the process of getting funding almost simultaneously to this “study”.
It still is petty, but a permanent reduction of access to the GWB is more believable as far as retaliation (and causing the Mayor to lose out on a development deal he in part campaigned on) makes more sense to me than one weekend of nightmare traffic.
I do not know it would, but If for some reason he wants to retaliate - hurting a mayors pet billion dollar project seems more likely to me than getting his town tied up in traffic for a weekend.
I just think the traffic thing - in and of itself - seems pretty petty - I mean it is one step up from when the Stasi would break in and rearrange people’s furniture. Just doesn’t seem that big of a “lesson”.
Who are they retaliating against? The blame was placed on the Port Authority, not the mayor of Ft. Lee. This whole thing was a bonehead move that benefited no one in the end, a spiteful act, not one calculated to produce a beneficial outcome for anyone.
ETA: just saw your last post, you seem to be agreeing with me.
I guess. But if I was an investor, I think the study would make me more confident that the lanes would remain open, not less. Since the effects of closing them made it pretty clear doing so was unworkable.
Plus the emails specifically reference increasing traffic, and while its not exactly clear, its makes it seem like that was the point.
And it doesn’t really explain why Christie would want the development nixed, or why he wouldn’t use a more straightforward method of doing so.
This was not done for anyone’s personal benefit, and so trying to make sense of it in those terms won’t work. It was done as an act of spite. The purpose was to hurt people, and it succeeded in that.
And yet that seems to be the case based on what we know so far.
Which people? The motorists? That was the purpose?
It gives the Mayor of said town a big headache to deal with. He’s the one with police and EMS who can’t get to where they need to be. He’s the one who is going to be yelled at first, when kids can’t get to school.
I think NJ should be losing any say in the running of the Port Authority for a while.
The real crime here is that the media latched on to “Bridgegate” and seems to think it is very clever.
Some years ago there was an individual in my workplace who got off on spiking coworkers beverages with salt or sometimes hot sauce. He was very good at not being seen when he did it so it went on for a very long time before he was finally caught red handed. We all figured the enjoyment for him was watching the reaction it caused; having anyone know who did it was unimportant to him.
It seems to me this is a similar situation - the people who did this simply enjoyed watching the chaos and aggravation this caused the Mayor and his city. I doubt having him figure out who did it really mattered to the perpatrators.
I have been wondering why this issue is framed as either “Christie personally ordered the lane closings” or “Christie knew nothing.” Isn’t it possible that he gave the instructions in a more elliptical way?
He could have simply said, “teach that guy a lesson” or “let him know not to fuck with us” and left the specifics up to his underlings. That way he could maintain some deniability; if he’s implicated later he can say, “I didn’t mean it literally! That’s just how we talk in Jersey! Those idiots thought I was serious? Good grief!”
The motorists, the people of the city, and the mayor, not necessarily in that order. Unless you have some other hypothesis?
That could be. He would want deniabiity. But I think if he heard this plan beforehand he would have put a stop to it and gone back to simpler methods of retribution, if he even cared about the mayor of Ft. Lee endorsing him. So he certainly may have created the environment where his political pals thought they ought to be doing something, but he wouldn’t have intended for this to happen.
However, all I’ve been saying is based on the little information available. If this wasn’t a purely spiteful act by political zealots, then there’s probably something more personal as a motivation than an endorsement from a mayor in the opposing party.
I believe it was a simple demonstration of raw political power, aimed at other politicians. It was the Christie machine sending a “Play ball or we’ll fuck with you” message. Of course it made no sense to the people in the traffic jam; it wasn’t supposed to. We don’t know yet who, specifically, this was aimed at, but that will come out eventually.
I have no idea.
I know left wingers consider every Republican to be evil, but to someone not blinded by partisanship it’s pretty clear that it’s ridiculous to say that the purpose of the incident in question was “to hurt people”.
So you think people were just hurt as a side effect because considering the lives of others you put into danger isn’t a Republican thing to do, or what? People were hurt, for no conceivable reason besides to hurt others. Why? It’s like if I suddenly smashed somebody over the head with a baseball bat and whined “I’m not trying to HURT people, I’m not evil.”
Actually, I think the plan is simplicity itself. You put out a few orange cones, and BOOM, an entire city grinds to a halt. Easy peasy. If you’re accused of political mischief, you pull out your PowerPoint and say, “See? Traffic study, dude.”
Wildstein and Kelly probably assumed that this incident would never get any serious national attention. Why would it? People generally don’t care about traffic jams that they aren’t in. That was a pretty safe assumption until Rachel Maddow got hold of the story.
I also read somewhere that when people called to complain, they were informed that the responsibility was the Mayor’s. If true that makes the whole narrative more coherent: “We’ll screw it up while at the same time telling the populace that the Mayor is to blame”.