Secretary Pete: It's Time For Some Demagoguery

 One of the many advantages to listening to NPR is that one gets a real time feel for what's going on.

That's how it has been with the Norfolk Southern Disaster.

The Governor, the EPA and the Railroad's CEO have all stood within smelling distance of a pile of fifty-some smoldering tank car hulks, masses of dead fish and neighborhoods of ash covered houses; they have drunk glasses of water and sniffed deeply of the air and pronounced the water and air to be pristine.

What more could the people possibly want?

The Secretary of Transportation showed up late, but with his usual articulate coherence.

He was so articulate and coherent that I don't recall what he said.

He might have drunk some of the water.

I think he said that things were only moderately fucked up and that we had our best people working on improving it.

What more could the people possibly want?

And then the Prime Ameliorator showed up.

donnie went to his people replete with feigned sadness, feigned sympathy and feigned empathy; and he handed out bottles of water with his picture on them and he handed out free red hats with his name on them.

Seriously, my fellow citizens, what more could people want?

This morning on NPR I heard the CEO of the railroad talking to the people of East Palestine.

He was saying that things were all good and his company was going to make them even better.

The people didn't seem to be buying those assertions.

I heard them shouting stuff that they want.

What they want is to be bought out at competitive prices so that they can sell out, move out and re-build somewhere unpolluted, somewhere safe.

What they want is open ended, free access to lifetime medical care for all the maladies that will only begin to manifest now at the front end of what will become a lifetime of post Norfolk Southern medical misery.

What they want is their lives back.

Those are a few of the wants I heard shouted by the citizens of East Palestine on NPR this morning.

If Secretary Pete has any thoughts of higher office, he ought to return to East Palestine immediately and declare The East Palestine Rescue Plan: Norfolk Southern is responsible MORALLY, FUNCTIONALLY and FINANCIALLY: no weasel words, no bankruptcy, for giving the people of East Palestine their lives back.

He should recommend this Plan for immediate legislative action.

If the Secretary has abandoned any thoughts of higher office, so much the better; the East Palestine Rescue Act is non-partisan and non-political.

Of course! that declaration would be dead on arrival; of course! the republicans wouldn't let such a preposterous proposition even reach larval stage in the legislature; of course! if such a law were ever passed SCOTUS would scuttle it; of course! Fox Nooz would see its ratings flash through the roof as it conjured and delivered slyly crafted lies that have proven to be the only nooz that Fox viewers will tolerate.

But something else would also happen.

It would remind the rest of us that the Party that gave us the New Deal, Social Security and Medicare, things that made the lives of many of us even possible, and in many other cases made those lives substantially better than they might have been, is still here.

And a vote for that party has tangible positive results attached to it, not faces on water bottles and red hats.

I lied about the East Palestine Rescue Act being non-partisan and non-political.

If there is a breath of life left in our Republic that reminder might be the thing that gets it off the ventilator.