Republican Governors all about Pain, Hurting Voters. That's Leadership.

Since when do we elect politicians to make our lives miserable and piss us off? We don’t.

Yet Gov. Chris Christie is taking his political father figure roll to new and dangerous heights. First, Christie is about to destroy public employee pensions with IOU’s. We've seen this movie before:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie defended his new $32.5 billion state budget … Christie, who has pledged not to raise taxes as governor, used his line-item veto power to eliminate the tax hikes, choosing to delay contributions to the public employees' pension fund to fill the gap, which his administration estimated at $2.75 billion over the current and previous fiscal year.  

The point is, we elect representatives to solve problems, not throw us under the bus with proposals we won’t like. But that’s what passes for leadership these days on the right, not doing what the public wants or likes. What's not to like?

The made clear that he intends to spend the coming months hammering the need for more drastic pension cutbacks and health care savings. "Whenever it's released, it will be universally criticized. And the reason it will is because it will inflict pain," he said, "because there is no other way to fix a severe problem like this but with pain."

In fact, Republican voters would like nothing more than to see peoples pensions plundered and destroyed. After all, why should public employees have something to survive on, when no one in the private sector does?

Observers say the kind of tax-slashing, cost-cutting, anti-union rhetoric is exactly what many Republican donors and party officials are looking for. "This gives him an opportunity to make a splash with conservatives by proposing some radical change in the pension system here," said Patrick Murray, the director of New Jersey's Monmouth University Polling Institute. "The more radical it is the more clear it is he's doing it to appeal to conservative voters," he said.