{"id":776,"date":"2015-02-26T12:10:40","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T19:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/?p=776"},"modified":"2015-02-26T18:39:50","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T01:39:50","slug":"the-real-scandal-of-the-christie-booze-train-is-american-journalists-are-a-gang-of-pearl-clutching-prudes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/the-real-scandal-of-the-christie-booze-train-is-american-journalists-are-a-gang-of-pearl-clutching-prudes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Scandal of the Christie “Booze Train” Is American Journalists Are a Gang of Pearl-Clutching Prudes"},"content":{"rendered":"

“It\u2019s late\u00a0Thursday\u00a0morning and some 600 New Jersey legislators, lobbyists and \u201cbusiness leaders\u201d are being knocked around a chartered, 13-car Amtrak train that\u2019s traveling from Newark to Washington, D.C., for the 78th annual \u201cWalk to Washington\u201d\u2014a bizarre networking event \u2026”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

So begins \u201cChristie and the New Jersey Booze Train,\u201d<\/a> an article penned by Olivia Nuzzi for\u00a0the Daily Beast.\u00a0She goes on to employ the hoary old college newspaper trick of putting phrases like \u201cbusiness leaders\u201d and \u201cbuild relationships\u201d in quotation marks and italics because plainly the former couldn’t possibly be doing the latter while drinking on a train.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s called the\u00a0Walk<\/em>\u00a0to Washington because the objective, I’ve been told\u2014warned?\u2014is to visit every car of the train, squeeze your way through the crowded sea of lawmakers, influencers and probably-criminals\u2014all of whom are drinking heavily, and it\u2019s not even\u00a0noon\u00a0yet\u2014and\u00a0build relationships<\/em>\u00a0for the duration of the nearly four-hour trip.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Well, of course<\/em> some of them are \u201cprobably-criminals\u201d! They\u2019re drinking<\/em> before noon!<\/em> She doesn’t explain what her idea of \u201cdrinking heavily\u201d is, but I suspect it\u2019s drinking more than one beer in a row. The \u201chell ride\u201d continues, wherein she is accosted by drinkers (or perhaps\u00a0even probably-criminals)\u00a0<\/em>who snarl\u00a0brutish things at her like: \u201cYou don\u2019t look like you\u2019re having fun\u201d and \u201cYou have to smile. Do you want a cookie?\u201d During one breathless moment\u00a0she is menaced by knife-wielding meatman:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cA man has laid out on three seats a spread of Italian meats, cheeses and bread. He is balding, and holding a large knife, which is somewhat worrying on a swaying train. He slices prosciutto as I walk by. \u201cDo you want something to eat?\u201d he shouts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Somehow she escapes unscathed.<\/p>\n

Why is he here on this horrible train?<\/em>\u00a0she asks an assemblyman when she should have been asking,\u00a0Why is\u00a0Olivia Nuzzi\u00a0on this awesome\u00a0train?<\/em> The story demanded a Dr. Hunter S. Thompson<\/a>,\u00a0but apparently all the Daily Beast could\u00a0hustle up was a junior delegate of\u00a0the Woman\u2019s Christian Temperance Union.<\/p>\n

Sadly, the grand era\u00a0of the hard-drinking journalist is\u00a0largely over. The reputation endures; the lifestyle does not. Once the men and women who gathered<\/a> and edited <\/a>the news were naturally expected to drink\u00a0much more than their readers, but now, from my own observations, the opposite is true. (I am excluding the fine examples set by the staff of Modern Drunkard Magazine and the Brutal Hammer.)<\/p>\n

Of course, the very idea that a veteran N.J. reporter is clutching her pearls at the sight of low-level politicos, union reps and Chamber of Commerce types networking\u00a0and\u00a0drinking\u00a0on a train is a bit hard to swallow. This is plainly faux outrage at its worse, an attempt to work up some sort of half-assed scandal where\u00a0none\u00a0exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“It\u2019s late\u00a0Thursday\u00a0morning and some 600 New Jersey legislators, lobbyists and \u201cbusiness leaders\u201d are being knocked around a chartered, 13-car Amtrak train that\u2019s traveling from Newark to Washington, D.C., for the 78th annual \u201cWalk to Washington\u201d\u2014a bizarre networking event \u2026”   So begins \u201cChristie and the New Jersey Booze Train,\u201d an article penned by Olivia Nuzzi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[146,149,148,147],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}