Chris Christie Calls Snowden Supporters “Civil Liberties Extremists” in His Latest Desperate Neocon Diatribe

Chris Christie is a uniquely American embarrassment. Only a person so completely consumed with his own bullshit and narcissism could miss the fact that he characterizes the word coward. He’s created a national presence for himself as a warrior against corruption, yet he only punches downward, and exclusively picks on the weak. While he rails against entitlements and takes particular pleasure in attacking teachers, he never dares go after the real entitlement criminals. Wall Street bailout babies, and the multi-national corporations constantly sucking on the taxpayer teat via corporate welfare are never the focus of his ire. That’s because he’s 100% completely full of shit with regard to pretty much every topic he addresses.

Chris Christie is the consummate authoritarian, and he worships at the altar of the rich and powerful. He loves war, the surveillance state and political control. He’s the type of person who would chop off the hand of a poor person caught stealing a cookie, while happily offering a deferred prosecution agreement to a financial oligarch stealing billions. The fact that anyone takes him seriously after all his scandals and previous examples of verbal diarrhea is a testament to how deranged and damaged our political system really is.

The good news is that not many people take Christie seriously, which is perhaps why he decided to elevate his rhetoric in New Hampshire today in a desperate attempt to earn some shekels from Sheldon Adelson, since the casino oligarch seems to have christened a new favorite poodle in Marco Rubio. Here is some of what he had to say courtesy of the Star Tribune:

MERRIMACK, N.H. — Making the case for a more active U.S. presence overseas, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will call for a larger military and a boost in defense spending while defending the government’s intelligence-collection efforts, in a speech Monday setting forth his foreign policy approach.

The likely Republican presidential contender will also use an appearance in New Hampshire to criticize President Barack Obama’s handling of the surging Islamic State group and the emerging nuclear deal with Iran.

“Iran might not have the bomb right now — but their influence is absolutely radioactive to the world,” the New Jersey governor says in prepared remarks released by his political action committee. “So we need to contain it with our moderate Sunni Arab allies, while at the same time rolling back the shadow of ISIS,” he said, using another acronym for Islamic State.

Iran is radioactive! How clever Christie, did you come up with that on your own or did you actually pay a speechwriter to come up with that idiotic soundbite?

Christie, who served as a U.S. attorney before he was elected governor, will also seek to distance himself from the crowded Republican field by offering an unapologetic defense of the U.S.’s intelligence-collection efforts.

He will specifically take aim at former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who in 2013 leaked thousands of documents to journalists. Among Snowden’s revelations: NSA had for years been secretly collecting millions of Americans’ phone records. Christie has previously said that program should continue.

“When Edward Snowden revealed our intelligence secrets to the world in 2013, civil liberties extremists seized that moment to advance their own narrow agenda,” he will say, according to the excerpts. “They want you to think that there’s a government spook listening in every time you pick up the phone or Skype with your grandkids. They want you to think of our intelligence community as the bad guys, straight out of the Bourne Identity or a Hollywood thriller. And they want you to think that if we weakened our capabilities, the rest of the world would love us more.”

Well the founding fathers were also “civil liberties extremists” with a narrow agenda. That agenda was laid out in a little something called the Constitution.

The most dangerous part of Christie’s language is calling Snowden defenders “extremists.” Christie knows exactly what that term has come to mean, and he deliberately used it.

Currently, almost all Western governments are aggressively trying to crack down even further on civil liberties in the name of fighting the “extremists.” In the recent post, The Mindset of UK Prime Minister David Cameron – It’s Not Enough to Follow the Law, You Must Love Big Brother, David Cameron specifically used the word “extremist” to describe the core problem.

The measures would give the police powers to apply to the high court for an order to limit the “harmful activities” of an extremist individual. The definition of harmful is to include a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, alarm or distress or creating a “threat to the functioning of democracy”.

If that isn’t enough for you, in the post from earlier this year, The “War on Terror” Turns Inward – DHS Report Warns of Right Wing Terror Threat, we learned that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security considers “domestic extremists” a core focus. Here’s an excerpt:

A new intelligence assessment, circulated by the Department of Homeland Security this month and reviewed by CNN, focuses on the domestic terror threat from right-wing sovereign citizen extremists and comes as the Obama administration holds a White House conference to focus efforts to fight violent extremism.  

The government says these are extremists who believe that they can ignore laws and that their individual rights are under attack in routine daily instances such as a traffic stop or being required to obey a court order.

So Christie is deliberately using language that essentially calls Edward Snowden supporters domestic terrorists. We can therefore be certain that a President Christie wouldn’t hesitate for a second in using mass surveillance on segments of the population he disagrees with politically. After all, they are in his words “extremists.”

Naturally it doesn’t matter to Christie that bulk collection hasn’t stopped a single terror attack. As the Star Tribune itself noted:

Independent reviews have found that the bulk collection program did not foil a single terrorist attack.

In fact, all of the thwarted terrorist plots you hear about on the news aren’t real terrorist plots at all. Rather, they are all FBI created setups. Don’t believe me? Read the following:

The FBI Busts Up Another of its Own Terrorist Plots and Politicians Rush to Blame the First Amendment

Manufactured Terrorism – U.S. Officials Claim Credit for Stopping Another Terror Attack Created by the FBI

A hundred years ago a real statesman named Teddy Roosevelt suggested America should “speak softly and carry a big stick.” A century later we have a New Jersey governor who chooses to: “speak loudly and carry a Big Mac (preferably paid for by the taxpayer)”

How times have changed.

And now for the Chris Christie highlight reel:

Chris Christie Spent $82,000 in Taxpayer Money on Concessions at MetLife Stadium.

New Jersey’s Debt is Downgraded by Fitch as Chris Christie Funnels Pension Money to Private Equity and Hedge Funds

Jon Stewart on Chris Christie…Absolutely Hilarious

The Trouble With Chris Christie by Chris Hedges

Chris Christie Calls Libertarianism a “Dangerous Thought”

How Marijuana Legalization in America is Destroying Mexican Drug Cartel Business

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger