The lead story across the top of Page 1 in the Newark Star-Ledger this morning was juicy, trumpeting the cheerful news that the hottest governor in the country, Chris Christie of New Jersey, has told would-be thuggies from the Obama White House that they can take the proposed Jersey-to-Manhattan rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River and shove it.
He just stabbed in the heart the largest infrastructure project in the country, to the shock of every soft-tissued, drunk-spending liberal from here to the closest dead Democrat voter.
Mr. Christie, the gutsiest governor in America, said the typical cost overruns would place too darned much of a financial strain on already donkey-burdened New Jersey residents.
A sensible politician. Must be a Republican. He is.
The first move by a stunned Barack (Lawdy, Lawdy, How I Love Spending Your Money) Obama was to consult the therapist NPR recommended Juan Williams see after they threw him out of a window last week for being crazy as a Fox.
Originally pegged at $5 billion, the tag for the Jersey-to-Manattan tunnel has jumped to $9 billion, on the way to $14 billion.
The other day, Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute wrote an eye-opening essay in the Wall Street Journal about the cunning way that cost overruns are strategically planned with major building projects (http://online.wsj.com/)
If left-wingers and other mindless camp followers of Mr. Obama’s devious wealth redistribution tactics will study Mr. Malanga’s essay, they will see as obviously as Gov. Christie why killing this ludicrous plan was the only sensible alternative.
Rail, as you know, is the most irresistible spending ploy that tax-and-flee Democrats, dead and living, have pulled out of their crinkled chapeaus in the last decade. Their greasy sales pitch never varies — just like Swish’s artificial, childish “Republicans drove us into the ditch” bedtime story that he has been pitching to “y’all,” as he likes to say, during his non-stop nonsense tour this month.
Is This Arc Related to That Guy Noah?
There are so many humorous angles to this story that I almost perspire before I can start. One of our gifted government bureaucrats cleverly named the tunnel “Access to the Region’s Core.” Sounds like it was borrowed from the birth certificate of one of Sonny and Cher’s offspring. When the marketing boys saw that, two had instant heart attacks and the survivor said, “Instead, let’s call it the ARC.”
Routes from north Jersey into the 34th Street area of Manhattan are as loaded as the San Diego Freeway every morning and night. And so the original Democrat promoters of this boondoggle two decades ago posted themselves on street corners and told all passersby that this tunnel was the quintessential answer to the prayers of all God’s children — except Islamic terrorists, praise Allah, you all.
If you have lived long enough to see an alternate travel route fulfill its pie-sky promise and genuinely lighten traffic on the old roadway, you and I must live on separate planets. I never have. That is a pipe dream as comical as global warming or global cooling.
At a brief press conference, Gov. Christie said it would be irresponsible for hi to saddle New Jersey residents with an open-ended tax bill that multiplies every night when they go to bed.
I wonder if he would consider running for governor of Sacramento next Tuesday.
