Pete Buttigieg, something of a genius in academic matters, is despairingly short of that when it comes to practicality, failing miserably, for instance, as secretary of the Department of Transportation. It’s almost as if his job is to sit and do little, disappear from the office a lot, get mad, entertain himself with peculiar ideas and focus on becoming president someday.
For 10 days after it happened, he didn’t say anything about the wham-bang train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, even though the crash was accompanied by a raging, prolonged fire, a huge, bulging, satanic-looking, black plume cloud and something else: the release of killer chemicals from train cars to keep the cars from exploding.
In fact, all kinds of chemicals were soon here, there and everywhere and many of the town’s 4,700 residents were evacuated from danger although later told by the government that they were safe.
Others said the threats could last for decades. A private charity promised long-term health care monitoring, hardly the concern Buttigieg showed when he earlier said there were 1,000 other such accidents a year nationally, as if none of this was a big deal.
