Christie: Paul should 'start cutting pork barrel spending he brings to Kentucky'

[WestVirginiaRebel]

The Hill:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ® on Tuesday escalated his feud with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) by portraying the Tea Party favorite as a big-spending Washington establishment figure.

 

“Maybe he should start cutting the pork barrel spending he brings home to Kentucky,” Christie said at a press conference announcing monetary grants for homeowners affected by Hurricane Sandy. “But I doubt he will, because most Washington politicians only care about bringing home the bacon so that they can get reelected.”

 

Christie was kicking back at a claim Paul made on Monday, in which he accused the New Jersey governor of being too eager to accept money from the federal government. Christie argued that New Jersey receives just 61 cents back from the federal government for each dollar it pays in taxes, while Kentucky receives $1.51.

It’s the latest incident in a public spat between the two GOP heavyweights, who are both likely 2016 presidential contenders.

On Thursday, Christie singled Paul out while warning of a creeping “strain of libertarianism” within both parties on national security issues.

Paul hit back Monday, saying Christie was “sad and cheap” for using the “cloak of 9/11 victims” to shield his position and accused Christie of having a “give me, give me, give me all the money” approach to fiscal issues in Washington.

When Christie's most recent comments were repeated to Paul on Tuesday's Sean Hannity radio program, Paul said, "Oh, you start trashing my state. Now he's really going to be in trouble.

"Don't start trashing Kentucky, buddy."

________

 

Fight! Fight! Fight!

[Draggingtree]

August 2, 2013

Rand Paul and the G.O.P.’s Ball of Cheerful Hate

Posted by Amy Davidson

 

Congress has closed for a five-week vacation, leaving the rest of us to figure out what happened in the several days of yelling about bills that no one was willing to pass, and to ask whether there is anything left of the Republican Party. The best approach might be to put together a diagram of who hates whom in the G.O.P., except that the drawing would get too messy; you’d need an Etch A Sketch and, like Mitt Romney, after a while you’d just want to shake it.

 

To start simply: John McCain hates Rand Paul, so much that he suggested, to The New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner, that he might prefer Hillary Clinton for President. Chris Christie hates Rand Paul, so much so that he said he was not interested in having a beer with him. Rand Paul seems to hate Chris Christie, since he called him the King of Bacon and mocked him to an audience in Tennessee by saying, “Gimme, gimme, gimme—give me all my Sandy money now.” But then Christie had compared Paul to Charles Lindbergh—for his isolationism, not the aviation. What was strange about the Paul-Christie spat was that Charles Krauthammer and other observers spoke of it solemnly, as though it was the intellectual engagement on the future of foreign policy that the G.O.P. had been longing for. Really what we were talking about was Christie saying that libertarians like Paul ought to come to Jersey and sit across from a 9/11 widow before saying that the N.S.A. shouldn’t collect all the information it wants to. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/rand-paul-and-the-gop-ball-of-cheerful-hate.html

[Pepper]

Catfight