Christie is a straight-talking, no-nonsense tough guy - right, ladies?

[Anonymous]

jesus, how stupid are you? the heckler is going down. i.e., the heckler is losing. how is that sexual????

[Anonymous]

A campaign is a competition. "Something going down" is an expression of dominating one's competition. It doesn't have to have a particular opponent or particular battle and it doesn't have to involve the heckler in either the position of down-er or down-ee.

But then, MWUN knows all that.

[TheManWithAUsername]

Anonymous wrote:jesus, how stupid are you? the heckler is going down. i.e., the heckler is losing. how is that sexual????

Holy cats! Someone finally tried to answer! It's only taken 3 pages for someone to offer an answer to a very simple question.

So Christie considered Romney or himself to be in a competition with the heckler, to be resolved later that night. OK. I'll wait a bit longer before addressing that to see if anyone tries a better answer.

Anonymous wrote:A campaign is a competition. "Something going down" is an expression of dominating one's competition. It doesn't have to have a particular opponent or particular battle and it doesn't have to involve the heckler in either the position of down-er or down-ee.

Except that he specifically said "tonight," so you might want to tell us which battle, and with whom, was supposedly going to be won that night.

Just kidding - I know you won't. Out of all of his apologists here, only the poster above seems to find it at all necessary to shore up his/her logic while arguing.

[takoma]

Romney & Christie -- the corporate meets the corpulent.

[Anonymous]

The "sweetheart" comment was bad enough, regardless of what he meant by the rest of it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sorry, 17:37 here, I don't know why the text markers are visible. It's like using Word Perfect! (And now you know how old I am).

Hah, I used a text editor before Word STAR came out, the precursor to Word Perfect. And I remember when a fax machine took 6 minutes per page, stunk like a mimeograph machine, and was the size of a small refrigerator with an acoustic coupler to boot!

And having lived in the Northeast, the sweetheart reference was so obviously dismissive, but nothing what so ever to do with sex (the equivalent of 'young man' or the like IMO) that it doesn't bother me in the least. I actually enjoy listening to him spar, so long as I don't have to see him - OMG give up the food and the diet Coke already. Dude, it isn't working at all! (Dude = sweetheart)

[Anonymous]

MWUN, if you ask a question and you get answers of the form "that's not the right question and here's why," you can of course disagree but you look like a jackass saying over and over that we didn't answer your question as though we are dodging some mind-blowing philosophical puzzle because we aren't up to the task.

[TheManWithAUsername]

Anonymous wrote:MWUN, if you ask a question and you get answers of the form "that's not the right question and here's why," you can of course disagree but you look like a jackass saying over and over that we didn't answer your question as though we are dodging some mind-blowing philosophical puzzle because we aren't up to the task.

I didn't understand anyone to be saying that it was the wrong question. I just saw people (or a person - who knows?) repeatedly vaguely saying that the comment referred to going down in a competition. I only asked my question in response to those statements.

If you think that Christie was referring to a competition, yet contend that my question "what competition that night, with whom?" is nonetheless inappropriate, please tell me why.

I popped on to respond to the only answer presented so far (which puts that PP head and shoulders above the other responders, IMO), but I guess I'll wait a bit longer.

[TheManWithAUsername]

Sorry - I should say that I understand some to be saying that my question wasn't appropriate, but I didn't see any kind of explanation of how/why Christie specifically referred to "something [or someone, I guess]" "going down tonight," yet didn't mean to imply anything specific. If that's your contention, maybe you could explain that.

[Anonymous]

It's possible to reference a fight without saying with whom. A number of people have said that's what's going on. He's vaguely saying, we're in a fight and we're going to win. It's not a prepped and polished statement. The obvious opponent is any non-Romney candidate. If your question is, with what exact person or entity is he trying to say there will be a fight tonight, the answer, given repeatedly, is no one. He is not making a specific one-on-one statement about a fight. It is a general "we're in a competition and we're going to win, those against us will lose" statement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's possible to reference a fight without saying with whom. A number of people have said that's what's going on. He's vaguely saying, we're in a fight and we're going to win. It's not a prepped and polished statement. The obvious opponent is any non-Romney candidate. If your question is, with what exact person or entity is he trying to say there will be a fight tonight, the answer, given repeatedly, is no one. He is not making a specific one-on-one statement about a fight. It is a general "we're in a competition and we're going to win, those against us will lose" statement.

dude, why do you bother? you are debating with an imbecile.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's possible to reference a fight without saying with whom. A number of people have said that's what's going on. He's vaguely saying, we're in a fight and we're going to win. It's not a prepped and polished statement. The obvious opponent is any non-Romney candidate. If your question is, with what exact person or entity is he trying to say there will be a fight tonight, the answer, given repeatedly, is no one. He is not making a specific one-on-one statement about a fight. It is a general "we're in a competition and we're going to win, those against us will lose" statement.

dude, why do you bother? you are debating with an imbecile.

To quote a New Yorker cartoon, as an explanation for why a person won't come to bed, "But someone is wrong on the internet!"

[TheManWithAUsername]

Anonymous wrote:It's possible to reference a fight without saying with whom. A number of people have said that's what's going on. He's vaguely saying, we're in a fight and we're going to win. It's not a prepped and polished statement. The obvious opponent is any non-Romney candidate. If your question is, with what exact person or entity is he trying to say there will be a fight tonight, the answer, given repeatedly, is no one. He is not making a specific one-on-one statement about a fight. It is a general "we're in a competition and we're going to win, those against us will lose" statement.

Then why "tonight?" Once again, as has been going on for this whole thread, you haven't explained the "tonight."

You're asking me to assume that it was mumbo-jumbo. That's not an explanation of what he meant; it's a claim that there's no explanation.

Were Christie now to say something like "Look - I don't know what I was saying. I was revved up, a heckler annoyed me, so I said something tough-sounding that didn't actually make any sense," then I think I'd actually believe him, in large part b/c as a sexual reference it was pretty bizarre. But he hasn't said that, so I don't know why we'd assume that it made no sense at all, as you're basically suggesting.

Why don't we just assume that anytime someone says something apparently offensive, they probably instead were blathering something meaningless?

[Anonymous]

It might be a puzzle why he threw in "tonight," although the majority vote on here is that it isn't puzzling. But assuming it IS a puzzle, the next most plausible option still isnt oral sex. For all the reasons given.

When someone tells a "your mamma" joke, do you spend all day parsing why it wasn't "your daddy"?

[TheManWithAUsername]

Anonymous wrote:It might be a puzzle why he threw in "tonight," although the majority vote on here is that it isn't puzzling. But assuming it IS a puzzle, the next most plausible option still isnt oral sex. For all the reasons given.

First, we have no idea how many voters there are. Second, this isn't representative, and third, who cares?

I think the people who don't find it puzzling don't feel like reasoning through it. (That was probably a good choice, given the length of this thread.) I still haven't seen an explanation of why it isn't puzzling other than: 1) the whole statement was meaningless; and 2) he was talking about the heckler being defeated later that night.

Anonymous wrote:When someone tells a "your mamma" joke, do you spend all day parsing why it wasn't "your daddy"?

That would be witty if it made any sense. Let me suggest this:
"When someone says 'fuck you,' do you spend all day wondering why the sentence has no subject?"

This is different b/c the fighting figure of speech isn't commonly used with extra meaningless words like "tonight." We've all heard that fighting phrase used countless times; I don't ever remember finding it hard to understand to whom and when the declarant was referring. When Mr. T faced off with Rocky, he didn't say, "Someone's going down Tuesday."