If a Train Crashes in Ohio and Nobody Talks About it, did it Really Happen?

Guest Post by Skinny

By now everyone has heard about the train derailment in East Palestine that occurred 2 weeks ago on February 3.  However, you can be excused if you were late to the party hearing about the crash.  There were virtually no stories of the crash all day Saturday and it wasn’t until Sunday night, after Ohio Governor Mike DeWine issued a tweet that the story was picked up at all.  A Google search show only 2 ABC affiliates mentioning the story on February 4^th, then an AP story on February 5^th followed by…nothing.

The story was memory holed for over a week.  Not even a controlled burn of vinyl chloride sending a black mushroom cloud thousands of feet into the air was enough to jog the media’s attention.  Since no black man was shot by a white cop and Trump failed to post anything controversial, the media was just not interested.  Incinerating and poisoning a bunch of white Trump voters just doesn’t move the needle.

Of course, that couldn’t be true of the Federal Government and the man in charge of all things railroad, Pete Buttigieg, right?  On cue Mayor Pete issued several tweets on February 4.  He tweeted about DOT awarding $200k to the Cherokee Nation, he retweeted a couple of Biden brags about bogus job growth and tunnel projects in Maryland and New York, and of course he reminded us that February 4^th is Transit Equity Day, whatever the hell that’s supposed to be.

Ok, no sense rushing until you get the facts.  The next day was sure to be different.  And so it was.  On Sunday February 5^th we were treated to a photo of the man of action seated in the back seat of his official gas guzzling SUV alongside Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm sending birthday wishes for the best known Canadian other the Justin Trudeau.  The safety-first Secretary is wearing his seatbelt but his Canadian counterpart is not.  I wonder if they were ticketed for this flagrant violation of the law.

https://twitter.com/SecretaryPete/status/1622390241142120455/photo/1

So the weekend passed without mention, but it is understandable due to Pete’s massive parental responsibilities.  By Monday he would certainly focus on the horrific events in Ohio.   Alas, Monday only produced one tweet; a video exhorting the benefits of electric vehicles made in the U.S.  Tuesday was wall to wall State of the Union Tweets.  Later in the week he was off to Louisiana to brag about some bridge that was being rebuilt undoubtedly with massive cost overruns since no federal project ever comes in on budget.

Then it was parental duties for the weekend before meeting with the National Association of Counties (there is a national association for everything) where he bemoaned the lack of diversity on highway construction projects saying  “We have heard way too many stories from generations past of infrastructure where you got a neighborhood, often a neighborhood of color, that finally sees the project come to them, but everyone in the hard hats on that project, doing the good paying jobs, don’t look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood.”  About the people from the neighborhood where a train had derailed and mushroom clouds of potentially toxic gas were rising, he said nothing.

Finally, at 5:50 on Valentine’s Day, just a few hours short of 11 days following the accident, Pete was fully committed.  Well, maybe not.  Here is the tweet:

In the wake of the East Palestine derailment and its impact on hundreds of residents, we’re seeing lots of newfound or renewed (and welcome) interest in our work on rail safety, so I wanted to share more about what we’ve been doing in this area:

https://twitter.com/SecretaryPete/status/1625628590850117633?s=20

He is telling us there was a derailment and its impacting lots of people but look at our work on rail safety!  Did it ever occur to this moron that a 50-rail car pileup with resultant leaks of toxic fumes is not exactly a good example of rail safety?

Mayor, er Secretary Pete (he really calls himself that  Follow @SecretaryPete on Twitter) the same guy that couldn’t fix a one-hundred-dollar pothole in South Bend, IN while he was mayor of the crap hole city is now in charge of an $105 billion (with a “B”) budget as Chairman of the Department of Transportation.  This represents a 24% increase over last year’s miserly budget of $88 billion. How, you are probably asking, is Mayor Pete supposed to run this godforsaken boondoggle of an agency on a mere 105 billion?  Thankfully he is not.

The Department will get an additional $37 billion from his ever-helpful friends in Congress via the ridiculously named Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which of course has nothing to do with infrastructure or jobs.  Mayor Pete calls it the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to remind everyone of the Republican fingerprints all over the spending blowout.

Obviously is wholly unqualified to run this agency, but we can certainly rely on his Deputy Polly Trottenberg.  Polly is a graduate of the world renowned engineering school Barnard College in New York City.  Well that’s a bit of a stretch.  Barnard doesn’t have an engineering department and good ole Polly got her BA in History.  She must have received her engineering background at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where she picked up her Masters of Public Policy. But hey, education isn’t everything she must have oodles of professional experience in transportation to earn her coveted position alongside Secretary Pete.

In fact, she does.  She comes into this position off a seven-year stint as head of the New York city Department of Transportation.  Anyone who has spent any time in New York can testify as to the model of efficiency that defines transportation in New York.  The trains and buses always run on time and the roads are traffic free and paved with gold.  This is also a slight exaggeration.  When they run at all the trains and buses are notoriously late and traffic stops at the slightest inconvenience.  This is actually a benefit since when the traffic does move, the ride is a teeth rattling experience from the awful road conditions punctuated by potholes that can swallow an entire SUV.  What Polly hath bestowed to New York; she will now bequeath upon the remainder of the nation.

At least the Federal Railway Administration is in capable hands.  After all, the director Amit Bose, comes from the highly touted engineering firm HTNB and therefore must have tons of hands-on railroad experience.  Well, not so much.  At HTNB he was a government liaison ensuring that federal cash kept rolling into the company’s coffers.  He may not have any real railroad experience, but he possesses more important qualifications for the Biden Administration in that he is a lawyer and has a masters from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.  So, although he couldn’t find the nearest DC Metro station, he is imminently qualified to serve in this administration and look after a $17.9 billion budget, the vast majority of which goes to paying pensions to Joe Biden’s retired buddies at Amtrak.

At what point do we demand some sort of competence from the idiots that run the federal government?  They are all supremely confident in their abilities equally horrible at their actual duties.  Always in error, never in doubt.  These departments headed by and staffed with lawyers and policy wonks who have zero practical experience with the tasks that they are assigned.  Of course, we can always vote them out.  Then again we tried that in November and ended up with John Fetterman.  Can we please stop pretending that this can ever be fixed?

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