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Better watch out for any person whose entire name
contains two powerful names in it: “Christ” and
“Christ.”
That person is
New Jersey’s
United States Attorney: Christopher Christie.
He’s also known as “The Big Guy” because he is
physically a big guy and he goes after the “Big
Guys” who are also the “Bad Guys” and “Wise Guys.”
Since Chris Christie became U.S. Attorney for New
Jersey in 2002, he has done a slam-bang job of
putting crooks in jail, many of them politicians or
political parasites, which doesn’t help
New Jersey’s
“image” as the home of the Tony Soprano mob family
in
Lodi,
NJ.
This year, Christie’s 153-lawyer office in Newark
filed 838 “informations or indictments,” compared
with 181 in 2005 and 687 in 2001.
“You’ll recall when I was nominated (for NJ’s U.S.
Attorney), there was not a great outcry of jobs,”
Christie, 45, told the New Jersey Law Journal,
which crowned him as “Lawyer of the Year.”
Christie was hardly the “Gang Busters” lawyer
cleaning up crime in the Garden State. His legal
practice at Cranford-Hewitt was in administrative
and election law with a smidgen of litigation,
hardly criminal law, especially in a
politically-corrupt State. “All that skepticism
(about me) was justified,” he pointed.
“I’m a huge fan of Christie, as I was New Jersey’s
U.S. Attorney in the early 1970s,” said Herb Stern,
who started cleaning up City Halls by putting the
mayors of
Jersey City,
Newark
and Atlantic City in jail for their blatant
misdeeds.
The headlines in the
New Jersey-New
York mainstream media in September reinforced
Christie’s popular role as “Crime Fighter”:
FBI ARRESTS 11 OFFICIALS
ON
BRIBE-TAKING CHARGES
Christie’s back on his white stallion, wearing his
Hop-along Cassidy white hat, exposing another round
of political losers: Democrat State Assemblyman and
Orange Mayor Mims Hackett, Passaic Democrat
Assemblyman and church pastor Alfred Steele, Passaic
Democrat Mayor Samuel Rivera, Democrat Pleasantville
School Board President James Pressley, Former
Democrat Pleasantville School Board Member James
McCormick, and Pleasantville School Board Members
Jayson Adams and Rafael Velez.
I
should mention that these public lawmakers are
“innocent” until proven “guilty.” They were indicted
by a grand jury, the first step toward a public
trial and verdict, and, of course, years of appeals.
What surprised most
New Jersey
residents were the two State legislators who were
indicted. That’s the State Capitol and where the
Democrat Governor presides as the State’s chief
executive.
That may not bode well for the Democrat party in
next year’s general election.
I’ve lived all my life in
New Jersey.
Born in Paterson, raised in Hackensack, and a
graduate of Rutgers – The State University, founded
in 1766 as
Queens
College.
During the past 48 years, I’ve worked on two daily
newspapers (The Star-Ledger & The North
Jersey Herald-News), covering10 Governors and
countless congressional races, not to mention local
mayor and council and county freeholder elections.
I’ve run the political gamut from bottom to top and
know where many of the political skeletons are kept
hidden from the voting/taxpaying public.
It’s sad to see my home state became a punch-line
for comedians, known as the “Jersey Joke.”
In
the real world, we must not be defined as a “Jersey
Joke.” We have some 8.8 million residents. Only less
than a1 percent fraction of that population can be
branded as “crooks.” But the “crooks,” convicted or
awaiting their trials, hardly represent the real
Garden
State.
The real deal is New Jersey’s brilliant universities
(Princeton is always ranked No. 1 in the nation in
present and recent years) – and New Jersey is the
home of such global superstars as Frank Sinatra,
Bruce Springsteen, Meryl Streep, Bon Jovi, Thomas
Edison, the “Wizard” of Menlo Park, Albert Einstein
(lived and taught classes in Princeton), and
innumerable authors, historians, educators,
entrepreneurs, not to mention America’s inspiring
symbol of Freedom – the Statue of Liberty on the
Jersey waterfront, and the legendary Ellis Island,
which made America a “Melting Pot,” and the State’s
own prominence in the American Revolution, where New
Jersey is known as “The Crossroads of the American
Revolution.”
And Princeton, not to forget our heritage, was once
the Capitol of the United States during that great
“Tax Revolt” of 1776, the birth of a new nation with
Thomas Jefferson’s
”Declaration of Independence.”
I
could go on ad infinitum….but my media space is
limited to only the crème de crème.
I’ll leave you with God Bless America! |
