New Jersey Governor Chris Christie often holds Town Hall style meetings, taking questions from constituents who often times decide to attempt to pwn him for some good publicity against the guy, but to my knowledge, every single attempt has consistently turned into a reverse pownage, much to the delight of people like me.
This time a guy asks Christie if he ever fakes those encounters, asking if the Governor plants questioners to enable him to go on a canned speech in response to – to which Christie scolds the man for wasting the peoples time and replies: “if I plant questions, why the hell did I call on you?”
A tiny bit of me doesn’t love that the guy was an old man and got dressed down in such way in front of a crowd like that, but a bigger part of me is more annoyed that the guy did in fact waste the time with the question since the premise is both asinine and not based on anything. I can handle one of those in a question but not both.
If a politician is scripting these events to appear natural and interactive with the community when in reality it’s a sham, that is kind of a big deal, so Christie was right to press the issue aggressively to get to the bottom of the accusation. The questioner doesn’t say it so clearly at first but finally clarifies that no one told him any questioners were planted and he has no source tipping him of as such – he just witnessed Christie being a badass by speaking extemporaneously on a subject for 5 to 7 minutes and concluded that no man could be that knowledgable and prepared for an issue arising, and thus Christie must have set it up to make himself look good. So he asks point blank and Christie says no and that could have been the end of it if the man didn’t go on with an “are you SURE though? cuz your denial didn’t relieve my suspicion” and once Christie understands that the man is just asking about his personal theory and not an actual claim by anyone else – he dismisses it again in Christie like fashion.