Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Contempt for the Law

The SUV carrying Gov. Jon S. Corzine was traveling about 91 mph moments before it crashed, Superintendent of State Police Col. Rick Fuentes said Tuesday.
The governor was critically injured when the vehicle crashed into a guardrail on the Garden State Parkway just north of Atlantic City last week. He apparently was not wearing his seat belt as he rode in the front passenger’s seat.


The speed limit along that stretch of the parkway is 65 mph.

The state trooper-driven sport utility vehicle was in the left lane with its emergency lights flashing when a pickup tried to get out of its way. Instead, it set off a chain reaction that resulted in the crash...

While we cannot bear ill will towards our injured governor while he lies in a hospital, and while we wish him a speedy recovery (this blog prefers to defeat their ideological opponents with logic and sound reasoning, and never takes pride in a fellow American's pain), the sense of elitism here is too thick to be ignored.

Ignoring the seat belt law, which the average citizen can get pulled over exclusively for, and going 90-95 MPH in a 65 MPH zone (which is a mandatory court appearance in many New Jersey townships) in order to get to a flippin' meeting with Don Imus is bad enough. But apparently the governor's vehicle virtually ran the red pickup truck off the road as its driver frantically veered in an attempt to get out of the way of the speeding motorcade.

All this, to make political hay off of the Don Imus debacle.

Imagine, for a moment, if it had been the young driver of the pickup truck that had gotten killed while trying to get out of the way of Corzine's political ambition (so to speak). What would the reaction have been if it were discovered that the governor's SUV, in a rush to get his share of publicity from a media feeding frenzy, had killed an innocent young man?

Would Corzine be held more accountable for his reckless, illegal actions? Would we have seen the State Trooper behind the wheel hung out to dry?

Would we have even have found out about an embarrassing, potentially career-ending, incident like this at all? After all, there is more than just garbage in New Jersey landfills....


Get better, Mr. Governor. 'Cause we have a lot of questions we'd like to ask....

UPDATE: Wow, even the MSM is getting on his case (a bit) - see the AP story here...

3 comments:

Erica said...

It's hardly my place to ask, since he's not the governor of my state, but I'd be curious to hear his explanation.

Just another notch in the increasingly elongated belt of celebrities/politicians who apologize/grovel to a fault and expect to be exonerated for their unforgivable shit.

One he regains lucid thinking skills, I hope he really will be ashamed of himself for thinking he is above the law. He certainly paid the consequences, which he'll have to live with. I'm not sure I would be able to, were it me.

The JerseyNut said...

I, too, am so curious as to what not only his reaction will be to the mini-storm that has brewed since his accident, but his subsequent behavior as well. Will he show contrition publicly, and return to arrogance privately?

I'd like to think he'll be a changed man, but I have yet to see a politician who survived either a real-life or career near-death experience undergo any type of transition (see Clinton, Bill) at all...

Anonymous said...

"A changed man"? Hardly.
These guys see their survival of such incidents (be they physical or political) as more proof of their infallibility.

He may change for the worse, if at all.