If TMR knows your political ideas, and still tells you to "pound sand," you might want to check how far it's shifted beneath your feet:

"Christie said breathless 2016 speculation made him 'feel badly' for President Barack Obama, who famously crossed party lines to join Christie in 2012 for a tour of the storm-ravaged New Jersey shoreline. 'He just won [reelection] a year ago, and as we shove him out the door, we minimize his ability to be an effective executive,' Christie said."

I guarantee you, it could be a great deal,...

 

The NYT’s exit poll data has now been updated and it’s much more in line with CNN’s numbers. Christie’s winning 48 percent of Latinos and 20 percent of blacks now, both double-digit increases from how he did in 2009. He’s also winning … 31 percent of Democrats. If the Times’s numbers hold, he should fall just shy of 60 percent,…

...Christie will have the margins he wanted among minorities. The 2016 campaign begins tomorrow.

As New Jersey's Christie Campaigns, a 2016 Strategy Emerges

Governor sees outreach to nontraditional GOP voters as national model for party

“Beating McAuliffe should not have been hard. Virginia Republicans decided to go one way and the New Jersey Republicans decided to go another way. It seems to be working in one state and not working in another.”

It was weird, to hear Ted Cruz's Army give lectures on political battle as they were losing so spectacularly, while at the same time dissing the only Republican who keeps showing 'em how it's done. I don't get it. Or I don't get how they can't get it. Even if they don't agree with TMR's analysis, they still ought to start grappling with two observations, with a commitment to eventual acceptance if they want to stay viable:

1. Christie, having his photo taken with Obama during a hurricane, didn't hurt Romney - Romney never stood a chance.

2. With the Tea Party exposing itself as racist over Trayvon (and coupled with that long-and-openly-discussed, specifically-hispanic phony, Ted Cruz) the Tea was too poisoned to ever win support against ObamaCare - a program for, just as specifically, those you're now known to despise.

That's it. That's the reality you're starting from.

Not Chris Christie - a Republican with skills - he's unsullied by any of it.

ADDED - The Atlantic sees it:

America needs a strong, rational, positive, practical conservative movement. It needs that bulwark against liberal delusion and hubris. It needs a voice that says we are imperfect, that life is complex, that government can create need even as it meets need, that you can’t fix everything and freedom is worth some danger and sorrow. And there are smart, honest conservatives at the ready to be that voice, to help govern practically and sincerely with that voice, but they are drowned out by the guttural scream of craven utopians raging against reality.

This moment in American political life is insane. That a group of narrow-minded zealots could push us to the brink of economic ruin, that they maintain a base of support in their frenzied, quixotic, incompetent gambit, that there is an apparatus that exists to defend this kind of nonsense—it came on us slowly but it is no less an emergency. This is broken. This cannot go on. 

And if you can’t see that then it’s not just the world that’s gone mad. You're crazy too.

Oh my! Peter Beinart describes what Republicans winning, via Ted Cruz, might look like:

The Washington GOP’s plummeting approval ratings may well boost the presidential prospects of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, just as the Gingrich Congress paved the way for the comparatively moderate George W. Bush. Like Bush, Christie is described as moderate because he has Democratic allies in his home state and because his rhetoric is not as harsh on cultural issues. But in the White House, Bush’s economic policies were hardly moderate. To the contrary, from taxes to social security to regulation, he governed well to the right of Ronald Reagan. Christie likely would as well. As governor, after all, he’s vetoed a hike in the minimum wage, cut the earned income tax credit, vetoed a millionaires’ tax three times and adopted basically the same attitude towards public sector unions as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful,...