Sunday Show Round-Up: Rove, Giuliani Try to Spin BridgeGate

What a different world it is from Chris Christie’s Sunday show pentablitz following his November 2013 stomping of the candidate of People Whose Kids Sit In Traffic.

Christie was so ascendant then that nary a follow-up question was heard during any of his five appearances. He was just as present in topic yesterday, but the adulation had been replaced by nothing but follow-up questions.

Karl Rove, Rudy Giuliani, and Reince Priebus were dispatched to field them in his stead, and executed the task with varying degrees of cringe-itude. Giuliani kept giving shoutouts to some dude named Ben Gozzi—must be a friend of his, though his relevance to the matter at hand was iffy at best—while Priebus got more tangled than a vowel in his own name by David Gregory, who jujitsued the RNC Chairman’s own statements about the IRS scandal back at him.

So the honor of Best BridgeGate Spin will have to go, by process of elimination, to—who else—The Rove:

“I don’t think the tea party is going to seize upon Fort Lee and the George Washington Bridge as their defining difference for Chris Christie. In fact, I think his handling of this, being straightforward, taking action, saying I’m responsible, firing the people, probably gives him some street cred with tea party Republicans who say ‘That’s what we want in a leader, someone who steps up and takes responsibility.’”

Good job, good effort, good job, etc.

Someone Please Explain BridgeGate to Bob Woodward, Please

Meanwhile, BridgeGate is so petty that the guy who put the “-gate” in BridgeGate literally can’t understand it—and Bob Woodward made his career off the standard-bearer of petty political crimes. Now, let’s hope Carl Bernstein is on Morning Joe this week to link Christie back to Joe McCarthy.

Guy Who Should Have Faked a Sick Day Award

The normally pithy Brit Hume got about halfway through this soliloquy about how old fashioned tough guys like Christie can’t make it in today’s girly-girl world of doilies and dolls and non-discrimination laws—I mean, you can barely force a woman to undergo an ultrasound anymore!—before he realized that he should have taken the advice in Robert Gates’ memoir and not missed this “opportunity to shut up.” Here’s his face, right about the moment it hit him:

Speaking of Robert Gates’ Memoir…

Some people have actually read it now, and lo and behold it says not what the screaming class screamed it had (based on cherry-picked excerpts of a book they hadn’t read).

Gates himself duct-taped his head back onto his neck to tell Face the Nation that he agreed with Obama’s Afghan War strategy, in the key of “Why are you people bothering me?” Meanwhile, over on Meet the Press Jeffrey Goldberg’s smackdown of Rick Santorum, who’d tried to clothe his own political views in Gates’ book jacket, would win the Smackdown of the Day Award, but Santorum’s a lightweight and this wasn’t a fair fight. Worth a watch nonetheless—if BridgeGate gets any worse, Santorum might one day beat Christie in a GOP primary. To 2016!

[Image via screengrab]

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.