Over the last couple of months I’ve been compulsively watching coverage of #Bridgeghazi, analyzing Chris Christie as he explains and, well, lies. Something struck me when he was talking about the accusations, and about the friends and staff members he was throwing under the bus. It was like a poker “tell”. I’ve seen this before, the needless specificity to add credibility to what one is about to tell you. I remembered two compulsive liars I’ve known, how they looked when they were making it up as they went along, like Christie. The nervous restless eyes, the “micro expression” (see: Richard Nixon), the constant verbal vomit of of information, the absolutely sure, often dismissive tone when they were proclaiming someone else to be at fault. And how as the liar’s story changes, spinning it as the truth, without shame or regard to the previous–different–story he told.
Christie’s 2-hour long, at-times incoherent #Bridghazi press conference meandered on without revealing conspicuous malice. His long, labyrinthine explanations offered up an abundance of information and specific details that had nothing to do with the question of his guilt as a way of validating his claim of innocence. He indicated nine separate times that he was “interviewing his staff “and would continue to interview them. He details conversations with people he said are not involved – why take up valuable time talking to us about your talking to innocent people? If you want to find who is guilty, talk to those you know are guilty. At one point, he said:
“And so now, having been proven wrong, of course we’ll work cooperatively with the investigations. And you know, I’m going through an examination, as I mentioned to you, right now. That’s what I’m doing. I’m going through an examination and talking to the individual people who work for me, not only to discover if there’s any other information we need find, but also to ask them: How did this happen? How did, you know, how did this, you know, occur to us?”
Christie gave the appearance of being cooperative by offering up details, but the details he gives lead to no real information except to tell us how serious he is about interviewing.
Chris Christie’s usual schtick is effusing an authentic, gruff earnestness. He’s a force of nature, letting it all hang out, not mincing words. He is strikingly self-confident and passionate, and like lots of Jersey guys, expressive with his hands, his face and his body. He often gets disproportionately angry, and doesn’t hide it, calling reporter’s questions idiotic or chasing a constituent down the boardwalk, soft serve in hand.
In his #Bridghazi speech, Christie kept his expressions in check, and his words uncharacteristically measured, while repeating how heartbroken he was. “I don’t think I’ve gotten to the angry stage yet, but I’m sure I’ll get there,” he said, as if he knew it was bizarre and unnatural for him to not appear angry. The dude chased a civilian down the boardwalk while holding an ice cream cone for saying something mildly derogatory about him, but he’s not visibly angry over this?
He took great measures to make us believe that he was just as surprised as anyone and that he was going to do everything in his power to get to the bottom of the lane closures, while actually saying something completely different. All the while the eyes are darting about, trying to gauge the room, then back to that doe-like innocence he slaps on.
Watching Christie, I noticed the tiny cues, “micro expressions”, brief, involuntary facial expressions that occur in high-stakes situations. A micro expression, or “leak” is an out-of-sync expression or physical gesture that sneaks out without the liar’s knowledge. A leak could also be an errant phrase tacked on to the end of a statement that then changes its entire meaning. “I don’t micromanage first,” Christie said at the end of an explanation regarding his management style. This nonsense also elicits another signature trait of a pathological – irrational defensiveness when confronted a lie:
“I am not a micromanager. I delegate enormous amounts of authority.”I am — there’s this — there’s this, you know, kind of reputation out there of me being a micromanager. I’m not. I mean, I think if you talk to my staff, what they would tell you is that I delegate enormous authority to my staff and enormous authority to my Cabinet. And I tell them, come to me with the policy decisions that need to be made, with some high-level personnel decisions that t need to be made. But I do not manage in that kind of micro way, first.”
The essence of why Christie’s going down the river for this is that nobody believes that a control freak/bully with a reputation for hardball tactics and retribution would’ve had all of his top aides suddenly embark on a highly visible revenge plot without his knowledge. And if it is true that Christie has a delegatory style, then he still faces the enormous problem of squaring that with the revelation that he allowed multiple deranged maniacs to enter his inner circle, and let them act with impunity, unmitigated by the sort of positive influence that a person in his position is supposed to provide. That’s the “positive” outcome here.
People don’t understand how “upstanding” family men can also be compulsive liars. In my experience, compulsive liars are able to spookily compartmentalize their lives. There’s a peculiar moral myopia afoot – any wrong they may have perpetrated remains out of their focus. Also, a profound lack of imagination, the inability to anticipate how their untruths, sexual infidelities, thievery, bribe-taking, why they didn’t come to your birthday party, etc, might be held against them. Their exaggerated sense of entitlement, be it from intellect, position of power or over-extended sense of importance, undermines their better judgment. As calculating or manipulative as they can be, they’re strangely naive about (or even unconscious of), how their unprincipled acts are often perceptible, and negatively interpreted by others.
With the two pathological liars I’ve know, one was over-the-top, unable to stop lying from moment to moment, and about the most tragic human I’ve ever known, lost in her mental disorder, unable stop long enough to find a way out. She always had fake knowledge of whatever someone was discussion and then to “one-up” it, often without detailed knowledge of the topic, without having read the source material, seen the source movie, or experienced the experience.The other was not as consistent, but had a paranoid spin to him that made his lies more evil, more likely to hurt people on purpose.
I was constantly amazed at the complexity of it all. It was like driving down the road past wreck after wreck, compelled to stay in the traffic mess to help. There is a brilliance to this level of liar, fascinating and dynamic people who attract others like moths to a flame. Consider anti-hero Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, a highly accomplished liar and fraudster. At the end we are as guilty as Tom is because we admire him and his audacity. Like the compulsive liars I’ve known, Tom Ripley is both fascinating and repellent in equal measure. Both liars were – unlike Romney and Christie – incredibly intelligent and highly verbal. They – unlike Romney and Christie – didn’t suffer fools – they were only attracted to people as smart as themselves, which they must have considered a severe threat of discovery. It’s like Lex Luther needs Superman to challenge him. It truly is a mental illness. Eventually, nobody can sustain a meaningful friendship or relationship with them. It’s just too exhausting and disrespectful and the trail of chaos gets too close to where it drags down your life.
Chris Christie, to me, shows every sign of being a pathological liar (pseudologia fantastic). He’s one of the most audacious liars in 21st century American politics.
I almost had a twinge of sympathy for Chris Christie when Mitt came out to defend him. Imagine, your once-bright career is falling apart before your eyes, your beautiful life crashing and burning. You need a lifeline. Someone to lift you up, pull you out of the quicksand when everyone else is running like hell in the other direction. Who do you get? Fcking Mitt Romney, getting up in front of God and everyone explaining how he supports you and how he thinks Chris Christie “is telling the truth. Who asked for this shit? You know you are fucked when the most boring man in politics, the semi-human charisma vortex, is coming to the rescue. He might as well just strap Christie to the roof of his helicopter.” Mitt is the one person I would not rely on to tell me what people are feeling or how they will react to Christie’s fuck up. First of all Mitt doesn’t have to deal with problems like traffic jams. Second, if Mittens was capable of determining how people felt about him he would have never tried running for president. Thirdly, he is a pathological liar, a terrible, audacious liar of monumental proportions.
Politician’s lies regarding “Issues” are bad enough, but Mitt Romney takes your typical, disgusting Political lies to a higher level – a level at which most psychiatrists would call pathological. Mitt Romney lies so much and at lightening speed that it is difficult to even keep track of all of his lies in a real-time manner. Everything Mitt says about his life’s events are swirled in a series of lies. with most pathological liars, Mitt Romney concocts lies in public to make people believe his ‘new’ story. He invents new stories about his life so his life’s events can top everyone else’s.
Winner of the PolitiFact 2012 liar of the year for claiming Jeep was “moving its production to China”, Mitt doubled-down on the lie, repeating it in ads that ran through the 2012 campaign. Romney made up his own jobs numbers, claimed Obama took Detroit to bankruptcy and that he raised taxes on the middle class. He lied his way through the debates, calling Obama a liar whilst citing random things from fact checkers incorrectly, and then tossing his swarmy smile at the camera in a vain attempt to connect with people at home who’ve always wanted to call a black man in a suit a liar…
In an attempt to give African Americans the “Illusion” that he has deep roots in Civil Rights issues, Mitt told a shockingly bold-faced lie and said:
“I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King in Detroit.”
When Mitt was confronted about his lie in 2007, he doubled-down, insisting that he did, in fact, “saw” his dad march with MLK in Detroit. Admitting that he didn’t see the march with his own eyes, he said:
“I ‘saw’ him in the figurative sense.”
The figurative sense? Why, yes:
“The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights,and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership.”
If he were a normal person, Mitt would have simply said, “Martin Luther King was a great leader for Civil Rights.” But as a pathological liar, Mitt swirled the events of Martin Luther King into lies to include his own family history:
“I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can be. If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term ‘saw’ includes being aware of — in the sense I’ve described. I’m an English literature major, when we say I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were there.”
He’s right that if I “saw the Patriots win a game”, in the “World Series”(?), it does not mean I was “at” the game. What it does mean is the game was actually played and the Patriots actually won. In Mitt’s Lie, “I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King in Detroit.” — there is nothing factual about it. Mitt’s dad did not actually walk with MLK so to say he “saw” his dad march with MLK is an outright lie.
Mitt continued to insisted his lie was not a lie but was the truth:
“If now and then I miss a word or I get something slightly wrong, I’ll correct it, acknowledge what’s wrong. But the overall thrust, the overall meaning of the story is very accurate.”
“Very accurate”. There is nothing even remotely “accurate” here. Mitt refused to admit he was “wrong” or “misspoke about the past”, rather typing it up with more lies. His lies go on and on. The only time in the entire campaign that Mittens told the truth was the one measly time when he didn’t think anybody was recording him. Everything else has been bald-faced. All of it. No thinking American can ever trust a single, solitary word that comes out of Mitt Romney’s mouth because he is a pathological liar, he seems to lie just to lie.
As for #Bridghazi, it’ll all come out in the wash. The upshot is, the whole mess will disqualify Christie for ever running for President. All because he closed a bridge in a fit of unexplainable pique, thanks to the fact that he is an inveterate bully. And americans remember that the last time Americans got Pathological Liars in the White House – it cost Americans $4 Trillion Dollars searching for imaginary WMD and over 500,000 innocent men, women and children dead.
Americans will re-elect a barely functioning idiot who starts unjustified wars based on manufactured evidence that costs tens of thousands of lives, but they absolutely will not forgive someone who fucks with the traffic.