WASHINGTON POST: Chris Christie, stumping for Mitt Romney, managed to shut down a heckler at a rally on Sunday with the political equivalent of a Your Mom joke. She yelled something indistinct, and he shouted back, “You know, something may be going down tonight, but it ain’t going to be jobs, sweetheart!” If he’d yelled, “That’s what she said!” I would have let it pass, because we can all agree that that would have been awesome. I thought the Republicans had gotten all that sex business out of their system at the Saturday night debate. This seems rude and uncalled for. Then again, there’s a fine line these days between “authentic” and “rude and uncalled for,” and Christie made his name as the former. In fact, his camp seems pleased with his performance. I wouldn’t know about this had Christie boosters not posted this video on his official YouTube channel, which, as Torie Bosch points out, is not exactly what you generally do with videos where your candidate yells fellatio jokes at people. MORE
SLATE: The video, which does not make Christie look great, wasn’t some hidden-camera “gotcha” depicting a private moment, a la the 2006 “macaca” video that may have cost George Allen his Senate seat. Rather, it was uploaded to the New Jersey GOP’s YouTube account. They seem to think his remark about “going down” is a zinger, something to be proud of, rather than recognizing it as flagrantly demeaning, even misogynistic. How would Christie have responded to male protesters saying the same thing? Probably not by changing the subject to what acts they perform in the bedroom. His handlers should be apologizing for the remark, not promoting it. MORE
SALON: Bosch actually mentions my recent piece on “the prudes of the GOP” by way of saying that, “clearly, Christie isn’t in that camp” — but I’m not so sure that prudery is at odds with a demeaning sex joke. In fact, I see it as an essential element of prudery, which casts sex as a dirty and shameful act (except under a very rigorously policed – and, quite frankly, rare — set of circumstances. I don’t know what Christie actually intended by his remark, but if it was to say, “Suck it, sweetheart,” I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. It would be yet another prime example of right-wing conservatives viewing sex itself as a “gotcha.” MORE
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