Friday, April 13, 2007

Oh to be in Jersey

From The New York Times:

CAMDEN, N.J., April 12 — Gov. Jon S. Corzine underwent surgery on Thursday night after a car accident in which he broke his left leg, sternum, collarbone, six ribs on each side and a lower vertebra, state police and other government officials said. He was in critical but stable condition at midnight, sedated and on a breathing tube.

Mr. Corzine was in the front passenger seat when his state police vehicle swerved to avoid an apparently out-of-control driver on the Garden State Parkway and hit a guardrail. He was flown by helicopter to Cooper University Hospital in Camden, where he received seven units of blood and a metal rod in his leg during a two-hour operation that ended about 11:30 p.m.

“He has what we call multisystemic injuries,” Robert F. Ostrum, Cooper’s director of orthopedic trauma, who led the surgical team, said in a midnight briefing for reporters here. “Injuries to his chest, lungs, to his legs, and he lost a significant amount of blood.” Asked whether Mr. Corzine was lucky to be alive, Dr. Ostrum said: “Yes.”

I heard about this last night when a friend who lives in New Jersey called and told me about what he considered a highly positive development for the state. While I do not live in New Jersey and therefore do not have his emotional investment in the condition of the governor I have to say that I completely understand his sense of relief at the fact that Corzine would not be tormenting the state for at least the next few months (although his wish that the governor would just die will apparently not be granted).

If you think that I'm going to launch into a diatribe about the coarsening of political rhetoric and how we all need to step back and cool down then you are sadly mistaken.

When I heard that John Edwards wife had breast cancer which had spread to the bone and that she only had a few years to live I said a prayer for her. She is not a politician and she does not seek a position from which to make policy which the nation will be forced to live under. Therefore she is not threat and all the normal rules of human civility apply to her. Of course I regretted my sympathy when I heard about the hateful and untrue remarks she had made about her Republican neighbor.

Corzine is a policy maker and his policies are so far to the left that many of them would have been at home in a Soviet five year plan. The state of New Jersey will be better off without him, even for a few months. Just look at what he was doing when he had the accident. He was on his way to insert himself into the meeting between Imus and the Rutgers basketball players. This was something with which he had absolutely nothing to do. Yet he was rushing there to stick his ugly mug in front of the cameras and associate himself with the "fight against racism".

I don't hope that Corzine dies. I just hope that he doesn't go back to work as governor and frak up the state of New Jersey any worse than it already is*.

*Yes Virginia, it is possible for New Jersey to be even more fraked up than it already is. Stop laughing. . . it really can get worse.