Peggy Noonan, conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal, went after New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) in a blog post Monday night, saying that the governor's recent remarks on government surveillance techniques are "wrong" and "absurd."
Speaking at the Aspen Institute in Colorado last week Christie dismissed the ongoing debate on whether government spying has become too excessive. "I mean, these esoteric, intellectual debates — I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation," Christie said at the time. "And they won't, 'cause that's a much tougher conversation to have."
"... Christie is wrong that concerns and reservations about surveillance are the province of intellectuals and theorists—they’re not," Noonan wrote on her blog. "He’s wrong that their concerns are merely abstract—they’re concrete. Americans don’t want to be listened in to, and they don’t want their emails read by strangers, especially the government. His stand isn’t even politically shrewd—it needlessly offends sincere skeptics and isn’t the position of the majority of his party, I suppose with the exception of big ticket donors in Aspen."
Noonan went on in the post to say Christie's "comments on surveillance were an appeal only to emotion, not to logic and argument and fact, but emotion. ... If this is the best he can do he should feel insecure."
