My blog this week was inspired by an article I read on feminist website Nerve.com about how New Jersey governor Chris Christie tried to blame "bridgegate" on an "emotional" and "erratic" female staffer. For those of you unfamiliar with this recent political drama, "bridgegate" is referring to the incident in which Governor Christie's staff engineered a series of traffic drams at the George Washington Bridge in a juvenile attempt to get back at the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey. He received a lot of heat for purposefully jamming up one of the most heavily traveled routes in the U.S. and has since made some pathetic attempts to shimmy out of blame. He had already thrown his aide, Bridget Anne Kelly, under the bus and tried to use her as a scape goat. That was low enough, but now his lawyers have even submitted written statements, blaming Kelly's mistake on her eagerness to please Christie and her unstable emotional state due to a recent breakup. I am so sick of this. In my opinion, that is one of the most overused and disgusting tactics to destroy the credibility of women. This article just goes to show that it is still very prevalent in politics today.
http://www.nerve.com/love-sex/jackass-of-the-week-chris-christie
http://www.nerve.com/love-sex/jackass-of-the-week-chris-christie
It was proven that it was actually her fault and he had nothing to do with it. Although Christie should have used better words, or none at all, he is still innocent.
ReplyDeleteYeah Paul I'm going to have to strongly disagree with that. This strays from the point of this post, but the people that led the investigation were handpicked by the governor. Here's an article about it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/03/31/the-ridiculous-chris-christie-report/
ReplyDeleteI think that you are making a really good point, Caroline. This is not the first time a politician has blamed a woman for being too emotional and making mistakes. "Eager to please" and "emotional". I am not saying that this woman did not have a part in it, but if you are going to blame her, let it be that she messed up because she had a lack of judgment and not label her with these typical female stereotypes