Chris Christie: president of the 6th grade
by digby
I wrote about the New Jersey Governor for Salon this morning. He ain’t done yet:
Christie didn’t have a lot to say about foreign policy on his trip but he hasn’t been shy about telling Americans why he thinks he is the guy who can straighten out all these thorny global problems: He doesn’t take any crap from kindergarten teachers and he won’t take any from tinhorn dictators either. This report from last fall describes how Christie sees himself on the world stage:
According to an audio recording of the event, he said Mr. Putin had taken the measure of Mr. Obama. “I don’t believe, given who I am, that he would make the same judgment,” Mr. Christie said. “Let’s leave it at that.”
People at the event were described as finding his foreign policy commentary “uncomfortable to watch.” Imagine that. Brian Beutler at the New Republic wryly observed that it was easy to imagine a President Christie on a long overseas trip “stepping on rakes” everywhere he goes because unlike all the other clumsy and cloddish GOP Governors abroad, his entire appeal, such as it is, is based upon his in-your-face bullying. It’s pretty much all he has to offer and there’s every chance that he’d destroy relationships left and right. But as Beutler pointed out, that might be the optimistic view:
[I]t’s equally possible Christie knows Putin wouldn’t be rattled by a humiliating, Jersey-style tongue-lash—and believes that only actual force, rather than just forceful words, would give Putin pause.
Apparently, Beutler was right. In New Hampshire this week, he made that explicit talking about how he would deal with China:
Christie called for a “military approach” to China’s advances to “let them know there are limits to what they’re allowed to do.”“That is an issue that we can handle militarily by going out there and making sure that we show them that we don’t respect their claims to these artificial islands in the South China Sea that they’re building that they’re saying are theirs that are hundreds and hundreds of miles from the coast of China and are clearly in international waters,” Christie said adding: “We need to send that signal to the Chinese very clearly that we do not acknowledge nor will we respect their claims to those areas.”
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