Everybody’s been focusing on the wrong word in this tweet:

CC summary: Virtuoso perf; all-in on no knowledge & limited staff role; still hard to believe Kelly did this on her own; probes go on

My problem isn’t with “virtuoso.”

It’s with “performance.”

This wasn’t a performance. Chris Christie wasn’t singing an opera for which you paid $50 a ticket. He wasn’t entertaining you and he wasn’t demonstrating prowess in appearing on a stage. There was no stage makeup and no footlights. You weren’t supposed to be amused.

This was a job Chris Christie was doing. His job was to save the job he had, of course, but ideally, his job was to explain what happened here. (What happened, as a friend described it at dinner, was that he became AN ACTUAL SUPERMAN VILLAIN.) His job, as the people defined it when they elected him, was to run the state, and part of that job was answering questions about this massive and almost incomprehensibly stupid clusterfuck.

He wasn’t putting on a show.

But that’s the problem, really, with Halperin and his ilk. Everything’s a show to them. Everything’s a movie and they’re the audience, and the fact that somebody died and a whole bunch of other people got their lives fucked up because Chris Christie’s people wanted to be mean (the most charitable interpretation of what happened) doesn’t even touch the halfbright pundits sitting in the dark, waiting for the credits to roll.

Nothing’s real to them. Nothingmatters. Not was anything he said true, not does it remotely match up with the facts, not was this behavior befitting a state governor and presidential hopeful. Was it a good show?

Halperin apparently thought so. Then again, he wasn’t stuck in traffic that day, so that probably affected his review.

A.