Let's go slumming

Ill-met in Oakton, proud Titania. Wikipedia.

The mainstream media don’t get New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. They think he is a bully.

Writes Jennifer Rubin. I love how somebody with a full-time gig at the Washington Post gets to speak of the "mainstream media" as a kind of exotic species of which she has a specialized knowledge she can share with her audience:

Voters don’t [think Christie is a bully] – by a margin of 49 to 26 percent.

That's according to a single NBC News/Marist poll which asked their national sample to make the one-way binary choice between "strong leader" and "bully"—

—and which also found that the very same voters have become a lot less likely to vote for the bullyoid governor in a presidential contest over the past month. They may be too polite to use the word "bully" but they do not like what they've been seeing.

Beyond political bias, the great shortcomings the mainstream media have are cultural and social biases. College-educated, politically correct, well-heeled and well-spoken, unreligious and pro-choice, these are people who generally don’t look or talk like Christie, nor do they have people in their social circles who do.

Oops, just spilled Chardonnay all over my class struggle. Do you suppose ill-heeled Jennifer might invite me out to that two-story brick house in Oakton (median household income $167,512)  so I could get to know some of those ruffians?

Just as they took George W. Bush — the reader, wartime innovator and now painter — as a rube and not intellectually curious, they take Christie’s public jousting with media and opponents as “bullying.” Do the media consider Obama a bully because he criticizes the media and says mean things about Republicans? Oh no! Not the sophisticated, urbane fellow.

Because it's not about public jousting with media and opponents. It's about public jousting with unarmed innocent bystanders—especially schoolteachers and other public workers—and still more about not jousting at all but fighting opponents in real battles to exact real retribution. Not that Rubin is equipped to tell the difference any more than she can tell the difference between Christie and an actual working-class tough guy (hint: the latter would be embarrassed to display such bad manners, especially in regard to somebody weaker than himself; in assuming working class people are as rude as Christie, Rubin is really just letting her prejudices show).

Wrong Jennifer Rubin, yet again!

Incidentally if people don't understand why George W. Bush became a "painter", it's clearly because he lacks curiosity and specifically does not read anything, ever. He's never been a rube, just a Greenwich Country Day bully masquerading as a rube, but he's never been much of anything, really, and now he's retired he has nothing to do.