There was a time when Vice President Kamala Harris seemed to be losing the spotlight to Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s Secretary of Transportation.
After all, Buttigieg was gifted a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan to start handing out. Mayor Pete, as he was known during the 2020 campaign, would be overseeing the rebuilding of America, one racist bridge at a time. He’s been perceived as more charming than Kamala and a more polished speaker. Rather dry at times but at least he doesn’t cackle like a giddy school girl skipping out on study hall to smoke in the bathroom.
Over the past two years, Buttigieg has had plenty of opportunities to shine in his position and demonstrate at least a modicum of competence.
Rather than rise to the occasion, time and time again, Buttigieg continues falling flat and nearly presenting himself as derelict from a critical role while the country’s transportation systems suffer and rot:
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg copped bipartisan heat Monday when he failed to address the catastrophic Ohio train derailment which released toxic chemicals into the air this month — but joked about Chinese spy balloons and moaned about a lack of diversity in the construction industry.
“It couldn’t be a more exciting time for transportation,” Buttigieg, 41, said in a remarks at the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference in Washington, DC, where he discussed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden in 2021.
“It’s had its challenges. I mean, if you look at what the American transportation systems have faced in the last two or three years partly because of the pandemic, we’ve faced issues from container shipping to airline cancellations … Now we got balloons,” the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, awkwardly joked.
But the one-time presidential candidate’s cringey attempt at humor went down like a lead balloon.
The Chinese Communist Party was able to float a balloon equipped with advanced surveillance technology across the entire mainland United States and Buttigieg uses it as a punchline in a speech about transportation equity. President Biden continues taking criticism for a weak response to China and repeated excuses for why action wasn’t taken sooner to down the balloon as soon as it was detected. Mayor Pete seems to think it’s something to laugh about.
Is this how “President Buttigieg” would handle China? As a punch line in a speech? No thanks.
Furthermore, as the New York Post story above alludes, where has Buttigieg been regarding the train derailments in Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina?
The situation in Ohio appears rather grim by many accounts with what appears to be a colluded whitewash happening between the train operator and government at all levels.
From the outside, it sure seems like an issue that the Secretary of Transportation might want to get involved in:
The train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3 was filled with several hazardous chemical compounds, documents from the railway company show — including the residue of one that is known for its link to genetic mutations.
During the accident, 38 rail cars derailed and an additional 12 cars were damaged by a fire, according to an investigative update published by the National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday. Of the 20 hazardous material cars in the train, half derailed, the company said.
Five of those cars were carrying vinyl chloride, a gas used to make plastic, which the Norfolk Southern Railway Company then released in a controlled burn on Feb. 6. There was particulate matter detected because of the fire, but the EPA said that it did not detect chemical contaminants of concern in the hours following.
“Residents in the area and tens of miles away may smell odors coming from the site. This is because the byproducts of the controlled burn have a low odor threshold,” the agency said at the time. “This means people may smell these contaminants at levels much lower than what is considered hazardous.”
For a political party that champions itself as a defender of the environment, the choir is staying quiet on this one as nearby streams and rivers are being contaminated thanks to government intervention of literally blowing up the wrecked train cars filled with vinyl chloride.
Setting aside the rail issues, which are alarming and still developing, what about the ongoing problems with the nation’s airports and airline safety? Where is the Secretary of Transportation on these issues?
Oh, right, he’s still talking about racial equity this week:
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on Monday told attendees at the National Association of Counties that government infrastructure projects should be done by teams of workers who ethnically look like the neighborhood in which they work.
“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 looking like, you know, doing — doing the good paying jobs don’t look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood,” said Mr. Buttigieg.
Yeah, that’s our biggest transportation problem. The people doing road projects in certain neighborhoods are of the wrong skin color.
Buttigieg has been eaten alive by the woke mind virus. He’s basically a woke PEZ dispenser who spits out critical race theory garbage every time he opens his mouth. Everything is racist, all the time, forever, the end.
Avoiding accidents 100% of the time is impossible, humans make mistakes and we are fallible. What Americans want to know is that when accidents occur, there’s competent leadership at the helm ready to recover and learn from the accident to make transportation systems safer in the future.
From what we’ve learned about Mayor Pete in two years, he’s neither competent nor capable of providing leadership in this area nor any other level of executive management, for that matter.
Buttigieg is, as many feared, an empty suit of wokeness that favors virtue signaling over competent management of the nation’s affairs. In short, he’s like Barack Obama without the oratory skills. At least Obama had a way of masking the woke while he threaded the needle of hope and change. Buttigieg, himself, has become the punchline.
Whatever hope he had of using his transportation gig as a stepping stone to the White House is all but dead.
