Chris Christie's risky listy

"Good news Mrs. Reede, the Dow
 is up three hundred points!"

In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Chris Christie, the former governor of America's former punchline state, New Jersey (it's Florida now), waxed malthusian about re-opening the country. When asked if Americans will be wiling to accept a daily death toll comparable to 9/11, Christie said, yup. He isn't calling for, as he put it, "rock concerts and football games" but he is saying we're going to have to suck up and deal with catastrophic death tolls because the economy.

"Doctors, amiright? What do they know?"

-Not the Governor 

I guess. Anyway, Christie, who isn't the governor of anything said:

"We have to start restoring the American way of life and if we leave it up to the physicians and the epidemiologists Dana, then we'll be locking in our houses for another year...until we have a vaccine"

-Chris Chrstie describing listening
to experts in an incredulous tone

I'm not saying they're pro-9/11, I'm just
saying it was good for them. Politically.

Ok, no one's saying a year, but even if we were, the new report from the CDC is talking about a 9/11 per day. And he's a Republican, a party who famously spent the 2000's using 9/11 to justify everything from wars in the middle east to re-electing George W. Bush. We're still taking our belts off at the airports twenty years later. Why is re-opening our nation's many outlet malls and hair salons suddenly worth three thousand people a day? Like, can we seriously not give this whole thing another month?

New Jersey: "the second worst state."

-Chris Christie, actual quote

Evidently not. But it's not like he doesn't know what he's talking about. Christie pointed to his being the former Governor of the Garden State as a reason he's qualified to opine on what we should all consider acceptable losses:

"I've seen it in my own state here, the devastation and we're the second worst state in the country."

-Christie, talking in terms of 

COVID-related deaths, but I mean,

c'mon, he's just teeing them up

But he does own Pearl Harbor on
Bluray, so it's not like Christ Christie
doesn't understand sacrifice. 

Bash then asked him what would his message to the American people be if he were the President during all this:

"The message would be, the American people have gone through significant death before. We've gone through it in World War One, we've gone through it in World War Two, we have gone through it and um, we have survived it. We sacrificed those lives."

-Chris Christie, who survived World Wars

One and Two by not being born yet

Ok, couldn't find a shot of him standing
in front of an American flag, but here he
is as Governor giving a press conference
while a building burns down nearby.

"We sent our young men during World War Two over to Europe, out to the Pacific, knowing, knowing that many of them would not come home alive. And we decided to make that sacrifice because what we were standing up for was the American way of life. In the very same way now, we have to stand up for the American way of life."

-Chris Christie, presumably before an 

American flag waving in the breeze 

while the Battle Hymn of the Republic 

played softly in the background

Pictured: social isolation party.
Sure beats dying in a trench.

I-uh...I mean-I mean, what? That's not the same thing. If we could have stopped the Axis powers by spending a couple months wearing homemade masks, talking to each other over Zoom and cancelling Coachella, doesn't he think we would have done that instead? We're not asking people to risk their lives to stop the unholy alliance of genocidal, white supremacist fascists and a hyper-nationalist imperialist military junta. We're asking people to work from home if they can, watch Netflix and not play outside.

"The convenience of the many outweighs
the slow, needless death of the few."

-definetly not Spock

Christie's argument is essentially that these people are going to die no matter what we do, so why screw up the economy over it? Which is...what's the word? Monstrous? It's monstrous, right? And also, it's not true. Preventative measures aren't useless, they're just not guarantees. And they don't work if you don't follow them. We do know however, that ignoring the physicians and epidemiologists and re-opening too early will kill a lot more people, especially older people and people who have health issues or are overweight, Chris. So let's not be idiots here.

Yeah, you'd better mop that brow...

And yes, it's gonna suck, we know. No one wants this. The economy is going to be a mess for awhile. But economies recover, grandma might not. And besides, aren't there people with personal wealth in the billions of dollars? Maybe we could, you know, ask them to hand it to keep us afloat? Not calling for a redistribution of wealth, just a “hey one percenters, before we start letting our most vulnerable drown in their own mucus, maybe give a little back?” You know, for the greater good?

Look, at the very least I'm suggesting is that anyone calling for Americans to die for the good of the economy, needs to provide a list of let's say...I don't know, five? Five close family members they'd be willing to sacrifice to keep the goddamn Dow Jones up. And no cheating, actual loved ones, no distant relatives you only see at holidays.

What I'm saying is what's the economy ever done for us? I mean other than
make a few people super-rich. Then tank. Then need a massive bailout.