Chris Christie rising: Alpha Dog and the Scolder-in-Chief

The ninth anniversary of 9/11 rang with hollowness this time. Different from
earlier years. This year we wanted a remembrance and didn’t get one. This time,
again, we got a lecture. We came to honor the dead and affirm the valor of the
fearless. We got Lady Gaga, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and another scolding
from Barack Obama. This, the quaternity of the reigning liberal zeitgeist, will
continue to hurt the president and the presidency with its immature
associations.

This time, maybe for the first time since, memory has awakened to its demands.
It was not enough. Next year, the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, it will
be decidedly different.

Comparisons with Carter are everywhere now, but we called them both out
ourselves, Carter and Obama, because we needed to rest a bit and recover. We
needed to lick our wounds. But starting this year, starting now, rest period is
over.

This is the background against which New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) enters
the room. I’d first heard him touched upon by Cavuto, half-joking, months back;
there would be a possibility that Christie, his neighbor, might consider a run
in 2012. But greater urgency has come upon us since the ninth anniversary of
9/11 this month and the controversy over the mosque near Ground Zero. Only
since then have we turned around and turned on the appeasers and accommodators
to ask: Where is Alpha Dog? Where is our Alpha Dog? Who will speak and act for
the rest of us who will not be attending the Colbert/Stewart show on Oct. 30?

Alpha is that quality that made Christie stand out in his confrontation with a
heckler at the Meg Whitman fundraiser. He has been doing this all the past
year.

History turns on a moment and the psychology of Christie’s aggression brought
to mind another time. New York was absolutely squalid with drugs and chaos and
the chronic harangues of nihilist winged monkeys; bankers were snorting coke
and messengers shooting up in the stairwells of Madison Avenue skyscrapers. The
pope had been shot. John Lennon was gunned down in front of his home. There had
been an assassination attempt on Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan was shot and
almost killed. It was all running together.

The country was worn thin and weary. Then one day at a press conference
President Reagan told a heckler to “shut up” in a moment almost exactly like
Chris Christie’s. And surprisingly, he did. Just at that moment things began to
turn around and get back to normal.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.