With gas taxes, we make the same mistake: We artificially depress the price of fuel so that the least efficient way to get somewhere — in this case, a private car — is also sometimes the cheapest.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has given us an opportunity to discuss this absurdity. On Tuesday, the New York Times revealed the true reason he killed plans for a new rail tunnel from New York to New Jersey. Yes, he was genuflecting before Tea Party deficit hawks, but, said the paper, the decision was actually “more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax.”

Washington gets some flak (not nearly enough) for not raising the federal gas tax. The last time it budged, a T-Rex was chasing Jeff Goldblum, and Meat Loaf was in the Top 40. But individual states are just as guilty of keeping their gas taxes frozen, which, because of inflation, effectively adds up to more deeply discounted gas every year. Fourteen states haven’t raised their gas taxes in at least two decades, including New Jersey, which now has the nation’s third-lowest rate — it hasn’t gone up since 1988. This has caused the state’s real-dollar gas-tax revenue to fall by 40 percent. By not keeping the tax apace with transportation costs, New Jersey loses half a billion dollars a year.

When we talk about the federal gas tax being too low, we talk about the fact that keeping the price of gas down encourages sprawl and discourages sales of fuel-efficient cars — both worthy concerns. But by ignoring the problem of states refusing to raise their rates as well, we miss out on the fact that, for instance, New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund is now $12.5 billion in debt. Wyoming last year voted down an attempt to raise its gas tax, the country’s second-lowest, which would have allowed it to repair underground storage tanks that are leaking petroleum into the earth. And South Carolina, which borrowed $52 million from Washington last year to close a budget gap created by its super-low gas tax, recently moved to cut that tax by 10 percent more.

And why not? Gas is expensive now, right? The truth is, the price of gas is unnaturally low, held down by governors who would sooner take a handout from Washington than increase the price by a penny per gallon. This thinking is creating a fiscal disaster for state governments. And it’s put New Jersey on track to earn a dubious distinction: By mid-century, it will become the first state in America to literally run out of land. By making “drive till you qualify” so cheap, all the Garden State’s unprotected open space will be completely gone in a few short decades.

Maybe it’s best if we just drive around it.

The New York Times has the details of the report today, and in classic Times fashion it is repeatedly calling Christie a liar without using the word. Instead, Christie “exaggerated” and “misstated” his rationales for canceling the project.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.

The governor then took billions of dollars earmarked for the tunnel — which would have relieved congestion on the two 100-year-old single-track cross-Hudson tunnels currently shared by Amtrak and New Jersey Transit — and used it for Jersey’s gasoline tax-funded infrastructure fund. Because keeping mass transit inefficient and gas taxes low is a really good example of “fiscal discipline” and tough decision-making.

The two extant tunnels currently operate at capacity, with minor delays growing into major disruptions of service on both systems’ lines. So next time your train to Manhattan is hours late, New Jersey resident, make sure to thank your superstar governor for holding the line on gas taxes for people who decided to drive into the city.

Christie’s office still defends the decision and I expect the governor to soon deflect criticism stemming from the GAO report by finding someone new to yell at for a YouTube video. Christie’s willingness to brazenly lie about irresponsible budgetary decisions while somehow maintaining his “responsible fiscal conservative” cred is why so many Republican elites hoped he’d jump into the 2012 presidential race. There’s always 2016!

How you answer all of these questions is a matter of political identity — your answers all but determine where you fall on the larger political map, and in the process, highlight your assumptions about a whole host of issues.

Now, in the wake of Whitney Houston’s tragic death, Christie’s done it again. By ordering his state government’s flags to half-staff to mourn the singer’s tragic death, he has ignited a heated national debate about who should — and who should not — be posthumously honored by the public. In the process, his move has provided a lesson in how dog-whistle politics works — and how the ugliest forms of bigotry still dictate so many Americans’ unconscious reflexes.

To summarize the details of this latest manufactured controversy, read the arch-conservative Washington Times’ writeup (emphasis added):

Twitter was abuzz Wednesday with reaction to the decision by Christie… In online postings, there were two main arguments against the honor for the Grammy Award winner who died over the weekend in California at age 48: One was that it should be reserved for members of the military, first responders and elected officials. The other was that it’s wrong to honor a drug addict.

Heather Clause, a Richmond, Va.-based blogger who writes about teen moms and was tweeting critical comments, said in a telephone interview that she was appalled by the planned flag-lowering.

“It’s just such a bad example for people,” said 23-year-old Clause. She said the decision was like saying if someone sings well, drug use doesn’t matter and “you can still be an idol.”

In upstate New York, Rebecca Eppelmann, a newspaper copy editor, also tweeted her disgust at the Houston honor, then discussed her views.

“It should be for major events,” she said. “It’s horrible that she passed away. It’s not something that should warrant this.”

Thankfully, Christie did the right thing and proudly stood by his decision, saying “I am disturbed by people who believe that… because of her history of substance abuse that somehow she’s forfeited the good things that she did in her life — I just reject that on a human level.” But that hasn’t stopped the backlash. In response to Christie’s alleged crime of honoring the dead, conservatives’ Fake Outrage MachineTM has rip-corded to life, generating the usual howls of heartland outrage — including a man who burnt a New Jersey flag in protest of Christie’s order.

Of course, when singer Frank Sinatra died and New Jersey’s flags were flown at half-staff, this kind of outrage was nowhere to be found — despite the fact that Sinatra himself was a drug abuser (the drug in question being alcohol). Likewise, the outrage was nowhere to be found when Elvis Presley died of a drug overdose in 1977 and flags all over America were flown at half-staff. Indeed, as the Rockford Register Star’s Chuck Sweeney notes, that event prompted an order for “all city flags in Memphis (to be) lowered to half staff”; compelled former President Richard Nixon to “ask Americans to fly their flags at half staff in honor of Elvis”; and got then-President Jimmy Carter to issue a statement saying, “With Elvis, a part of our country has died.”

What, then, explains the difference? Why would there be a hostile reaction to the way New Jersey memorialized the drug-abusing Houston, when there was no such hostile reaction to the way the drug-abusing Sinatra and Presley were memorialized?

The answer, of course, is rooted, in part, in racist and sexist double standards.

When famous white men engage in illicit activities, American culture allows them to nonetheless retain their street cred, their wholesome image and their public honor. In some instances, in fact, the illicit behavior contributes to their mystique and their legacy — it is seen as a cool part of who they are. This is exactly why one of the iconic images of Sinatra is him in a tux with a highball in his hand — because a white, male-dominated culture accepts — and even at times celebrates — the blemishes of fellow white men.

By contrast, when famous women — and particularly famous women of color — engage in the same behavior, the same swath of America that celebrates the Presleys and Sinatras often reacts with indignant disgust. Hence, the backlash to Christie daring to minimally honor Houston — a reaction that shows a white, male-dominated culture which accepts the imperfections of white males simultaneously refuses to accept the imperfections of “the other.”

Importantly, such a double-standard isn’t just amplified by men. In this case, some of those criticizing Christie’s decision are women. But that merely shows how pervasive the double standard really is — it’s so widespread and so accepted that it’s operating at a subconscious level across demographic divides.

To be sure, it’s fair to raise questions about whether any entertainer deserves the same form of state-sponsored memorial as soldiers, elected officials, first responders and other public servants. Such principled and necessary queries make us contemplate a culture that overly deifies famous people, regardless of why they are famous — and challenging that celebrity-worshiping theology is important.

However, if we are going to accept entertainers being recognized and memorialized by our civic institutions, then we ought to apply one standard. Either icons should be recognized regardless of their lifestyle choices, or they should not be recognized because of their lifestyle choices. Applying two standards to two sets of icons — and applying those standards selectively against women and minorities — converts solemn memorials of the dead into more ugly expressions of racism, sexism and other pathologies that still plague America.

Bosch actually mentions my recent piece on “the prudes of the GOP” by way of saying that, “clearly, Christie isn’t in that camp” — but I’m not so sure that prudery is at odds with a demeaning sex joke. In fact, I see it as an essential element of prudery, which casts sex as a dirty and shameful act (except under a very rigorously policed – and, quite frankly, rare — set of circumstances. I don’t know what Christie actually intended by his remark, but if it was to say, “Suck it, sweetheart,” I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. It would be yet another prime example of right-wing conservatives viewing sex itself as a “gotcha.”

So he made the safe call, using a press conference in Trenton to say that he’d felt obligated to consider pleas from Republicans to enter the race but that “the deciding factor was that it did not feel right to me, in my gut, to leave now when the job here is not finished.” But when you look at what, exactly, he’s saying no to, it raises the question of whether Christie made a smart call. Just consider what the Republican presidential race now looks like.

There’s Mitt Romney, who’s the nominal front-runner and the safest-seeming general election option for the GOP. But Romney has been running for president with all his might for six years now, and he can’t seem to break 25 percent in national polls. Romney’s profound vulnerability was confirmed when Rick Perry entered the race in mid-August and immediately overtook Romney, building a comfortable double-digit lead. It’s only because Perry has performed so poorly as a candidate that Romney has managed to retake the lead, but even that comes with an asterisk: Almost all of the support that Perry has lost in the last few weeks has gone to second-tier fringe candidates (Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, mainly) instead of Romney. The newest poll, from ABC News and the Washington Post, has Romney at 25 percent, followed by Cain and Perry at 17. This is a sad commentary on Romney’s standing within his own party.

And let’s look closer at Perry, because his freefall may be even worse than that poll suggests. There’s also a new survey in Florida, released yesterday afternoon, that has him plummeting to fourth place — with just nine percent, behind even Gingrich. The promise of Perry’s campaign was that he’d instantly and permanently unify conservatives, who had been desperately seeking a credible alternative to Romney. Instead, he’s unnerved them with overheated campaign trail antics and a series of mediocre to brutally bad debate performances. And he’s failed so far to provide them with a satisfactory cover story for his own ideological baggage, which has actually allowed Romney — yes, Romney — to tout himself as the candidate of consistency.

Nor is there any reason to regard Cain as a threat to win the nomination, despite his recent return to prominence. He has no discernible strategy (and doesn’t even plan on being in Iowa for more than a month!) and just lost his press secretary … to a campaign for lieutenant governor. And when the spotlight was on him earlier this year, he demonstrated an alarming lack of basic foreign policy knowledge. The more attention Cain gets now, the more likely he is to wilt — again. The same is doubly true for Gingrich, who is essentially waging a one-man campaign with no money or organization. His recent polling success is the product of a few strong-seeming debate performances, but if you think he’s on the verge of becoming a contender, just remember: He’s unusually prone to self-destruction. 

This is the field that Christie would have been running against. Already, without even lifting a finger, he was running at 17 percent nationally, according to a just-completed Quinnipiac poll, tied with Romney for first and ahead of Cain (12 percent) and Perry (10). And while it wasn’t quite as rosy for Christie, the ABC/Washington Post survey has had him at 10 percent.

Some believe it would have been all downhill from there, and maybe they’re right. But think back to that question-and-answer session Christie did at the Reagan Library last week, the one that ended with the woman begging him to run, and the crowd responding with a standing ovation. The performance was vintage Christie. In off-the-cuff-settings — town halls, debates, interviews — he is one of the strongest, most compelling communicators in American politics today. Like him or not, he’s a lot more than the caricature of rage that many mistakenly assume he is. He generates positive personal feelings from audiences, particularly Republican audiences; they like him and they want to be with him — and if that means rationalizing away a less-than-conservative past position or two, they’ll do it. Romney and Perry and most other politicians on the national stage today just don’t have the same effect on people.

What’s most amazing is that the value of the Republican nomination is only increasing, even as the party’s nominating process looks more and more like a farce. Given the state of the economy, just about any candidate the GOP nominates will have a real chance of defeating Barack Obama and becoming president. And yet the party is stuck choosing between Romney and Perry. Oh, and maybe a pizza guy, too.