SALON

Wednesday, Jan 12, 2011 10:50 PM UTC

Chris Christie feuds with Rudy Giuliani over snow

He may be friends with the former New York mayor, but no one criticizes the New Jersey mayor and gets away with it

By

Topics: Chris Christie, War Room, Rudy Giuliani,

Chris Christie feuds with Rudy Giuliani over snow

Sad news, patriots: Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani are fighting. They’re both unpleasant bullies who get off on acting like tough guys, so this should probably surprise no one, but it’s still a bit like Daddy and other Daddy yelling at each other.

Rudy Giuliani’s reputation rests on his tyrannical rule of New York City. While Bloomberg has kept aspects of the Giuliani management style — like his utterly unaccountable and institutionally racist NYPD — in place, he has seriously dialed back the shouty rhetoric. So when the post-Christmas snowstorm came and the city’s response was atypically inept and slow, Giuliani went around telling everyone that in his New York, all the snow would’ve been plowed, beaten and shot 41 times within 24 hours.

New Jersey’s loud governor was out of town during the storm, and his state’s response was similarly inadequate. So last week, Giuliani said Christie should’ve raced back home. “They elected you governor, they’ve got an emergency, they expect you to be there,” he said. That is actually an incredibly polite and reasonable comment for Giuliani. Chris Christie, on Fox & Friends today, responded:

“Well, he’s wrong. I mean, he’s wrong,” Christie countered Wednesday. “It’s easy when you are out of office to be shooting from the peanut gallery when you no longer have any responsibility, but I have a responsibility to my family,” he added. “I would have never gone on the trip if we didn’t have a plan in place to be able to clear the snow.
[...]
“Yeah, I’m just going to chalk it off to a bad morning for the mayor. Maybe he didn’t have a good breakfast or something like that,” Christie quipped.
[...]
“My point is what matters are results. And what the people of New Jersey voted for me for was not to be on the back of a snow plow. They voted for me to get the job done. And we got the job done.”

“I have great respect for Mayor Giuliani and maybe no bran that morning — I don’t know what the situation was, so we’ll just let it go,” Christie concluded.

For the record, the job did not get done, because state highways were impassable. Also, this “responsibility to my family” line is so weird, in terms of a vacation to Disney World.

But this is how Christie responds to his friends, with the weird jokes about breakfast and so on. If a non-friend — say, a random, non-famous New Jersey resident — criticizes the governor, Christie instead does that thing where he gets in the guy’s face and points his finger and shouts about how stupid the guy is, for the YouTube.

Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 11 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations