If any single political figure in America is a flesh-and-blood personification of a Rorschach test, it is Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. In almost every way, he raises vexing questions which ultimately say more about us than they do about him.

Is he, for instance, refreshingly authentic or just downright offensive? Is he regular-guy fat or too obese to be president? Is he a rare moderate Republican who is at least willing to discuss legalizing gay marriage or is he a standard GOP bigot who is deftly maneuvering to prevent such legalization?

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.

Here’s a wild statistic: At any given moment, a third of the cars in Manhattan are just passing through on their way to somewhere else. Why? Because it’s cheaper than driving around it.

Thanks to a quirk of history, the East River bridges to Manhattan aren’t tolled, nor are the outbound Hudson tunnels — you can drive from Long Island to New Jersey for free if you go through Manhattan. Go around Manhattan, however, and you’ll hit tolls of up to $13. The system gives drivers a financial incentive to drive straight through the most crowded, most congested patch of land in the country.

Whoops, turns out Chris Christie was just lying about everything when he canceled that train tunnel project in 2010.

Canceling the long-planned Access to the Region’s Core rail tunnel project was likely the most high-profile decision Christie made in his first months as governor of New Jersey. The press generally treated it as a tough-but-necessary decision from a no-nonsense politician who was getting serious about the budget. It was actually just an incredibly short-sighted way of getting around a promise not to raise New Jersey’s (very low) gas tax. And Christie lied about the reason he canceled the project, according to a study from the Government Accountability Office.

While stumping for Mitt Romney on Sunday night, Chris Christie made what some have interpreted as a blow-job joke. A couple of female hecklers in the crowd shouted something about jobs “going down” and Christie responded, “You know, something may be going down tonight, but it ain’t going to be jobs, sweetheart” (the video is below).

His body language, tone and diminishing use of “sweetheart” — not to mention the “oooh” of the crowd — made me hear it as a blow-job joke, but I didn’t exactly trust my interpretation, seeing I hear sexual double-entendres everywhere. Some cleaner-minded commentators have picked up on it too, though: XX Factor’s Torie Bosch called it an “oral sex joke” that was “flagrantly demeaning, even misogynistic.” Slate’s David Weigel, who was present at the event, writes, “I can honestly say that the fellatial joke didn’t occur to me at all … it sounded like the ‘something’ was just the Occupy movement, as in ‘you’re gonna go down.’” In this case, it seems hindsight was … X-rated: Weigel ends his blog post with, “But now that I think about it … .”

There were plenty of obvious, logical reasons for Chris Christie to announce this afternoon — hardly for the first time, but probably for the last time — that he won’t run for president in 2012.

Filing deadlines for key early primaries are a few weeks away and the first contests are just a couple months away, meaning that Christie would have had almost no time to build a national fundraising network and a state-by-state campaign infrastructure from scratch. And there would have been all of that uncomfortable scrutiny from conservative opinion leaders — not to mention his opponents — over his secret liberal past, particularly on immigration. Plus, he would have been risking everything he has in New Jersey, with a losing national campaign (one that he would have embarked on after a year’s worth of adamant, over-the-top denials) making his path to reelection as governor in 2013 even more iffy than it already is.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he will not seek the White House in 2012 and says “now is not my time.”

Christie said Tuesday he felt an obligation to reconsider his repeated statements he would not make a White House run. Party leaders in recent weeks have lobbied him to re-evaluate that position and he spent the weekend considering a late entry into the field.

He says he wants to remain governor of New Jersey — but isn’t ruling out a future White House run.

If he had run, he would have faced a challenge to quickly assemble a campaign just three months before voting begins.

The blunt governor also told his constituents: “whether you like it or not, you’re stuck with me.”

His decision means that three months before voting is set to begin, the Republican race remains focused on two men — former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry.