Christie’s powerful when he shouldn’t be

Via Think Progress comes Alyssa Rosenberg’s comments on one lesson from the news of Chris Christie’s politics in NJ:

What happened to people who were affected by the traffic closure was ridiculous. But a willingness to inflict ridiculous consequences on innocent people is actually a rather serious thing to do. People who want Chris Christie to suffer the consequences of the tone he appears to have set in New Jersey would do well to remember that. Lampooning him as fat (a subject on which Linda Holmes has a great number of eloquent things to say) or childish both falls into the same sort of tactics Christie himself uses, and misses the point that Christie’s vindictiveness and hectoring style has made him extremely successful. That doesn’t mean we can’t mine humor out of the bridge scandal, and anything else might follow. But that humor needs to be in service of the idea that Christie’s powerful when he shouldn’t be, rather than assuming that everyone shares the idea that he’s laughable.

And she points to Springsteen’s new parody using ‘Born to Run’ under the fold.