VIDEO: Murphy compares his administration to… Brezhnev’s?

TRENTON, N.J. – Add Leonid Brezhnev to the list of Phil Murphy’s apparent role models.

It’s impossible to make this stuff up, folks! Couldn’t if I tried.

Murphy inadvertently (?) revealed his crush at Wednesday’s daily press availability when Dustin Racioppi of NorthJersey.com (one of a handful of New Jersey mainstream reporters who don’t suck) asked Murphy a comprehensive question concerning the Administration’s many transparency failures.

“So far in the pandemic, you have approved a change to the open records law that effectively gives custodians license to delay requests for weeks or months, the legislature rushed through the stop gap budget bill which you signed, the public has no say in the $10 billion bonding bill, and your office has declined to release records backing up costs for savings with the CWA and certain details about your task forces and recovery panels,” Racioppi said. “Do you think the public deserves more transparency from state government, especially in a pandemic, and are you living up to your own values on transparency in government?”

Murphy first responded to some other precursor questions. Then he seemed almost amused. 

“Dustin, I think if you were to replay a tape of your lasy question, you could’ve put that into Soviet Union 1975,” quipped the Governor before issuing a denial of the reporter’s premise.

[Brezhnev – for those of you who learned history from the NJEA – was general secretary of the Soviet Union’s communist party in 1975.]

What’s really scary is that he wasn’t he able to directly refute any of Racioppi’s cited transparency transgressions.

This also isn’t the first time Murphy has gotten a little excited talking about the glory days of the USSR; back in late May, he gushed over a downright creepy Soviet-style graphic produced by some mask-sewing volunteers at a daily COVID-19 presser.

Seeing/hearing is believing. Watch below (beginning at the 46:12 mark):

 

Matt Rooney
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MATT ROONEY is SaveJersey.com's founder and editor-in-chief, a practicing New Jersey attorney, and the host of 'The Matt Rooney Show' on 1210 WPHT every Sunday evening from 7-10PM EST.