MARCUS: Residents in East Palestine aren’t seeing a helping hand from Biden and Buttigieg so much as a middle finger. On Tuesday, Buttigieg said he’ll go to Ohio – eventually.
It must have been cold comfort to the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, who awoke on President’s Day morning – some coughing, others spotted with rash, or wrestling nausea and headaches – to see their president… in Ukraine.
Still wracked by unanswered questions about the cause of and response to a potentially deadly, toxic train wreck in their small and largely forgotten Rust Belt town, they must have watched Biden on a tour of Kyiv and wondered why hardly anyone from the White House has come to see them too.
It’s been 18 days since the crash, and not only has Biden not deigned to survey the damage himself, but the mayor of East Palestine claims it took two weeks for the White House to even reach out to him.
Biden’s embattled Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg couldn’t be bothered to mention the rail calamity for 11 days and then only mustered up the cowardly condescension of a tweet.
He, too, still hasn’t shown up.
So, why the hell not?
Residents in East Palestine aren’t seeing a helping hand from Biden and Buttigieg so much as a middle finger.
On Tuesday, in a powder puff interview with Democratic operative-turned-ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, Buttigieg said he’ll go to East Palestine – eventually.
‚I am planning to go,‘ he told Stephanopoulos before immediately segueing into spin. ‚I do want to stress – the NTSB [the National Transportation Safety Board] needs to be able to do this work independently.‘
For the record, this is a stinking pile of garbage. No one expects Buttigieg to be sorting through the rubble himself. He’s not taking soil samples. We’re not worried about him trampling over a crime scene.
The people of East Palestine, one of whom shouted in a townhall meeting last week, ‚Where’s Pete Buttigieg? Where’s he at?‘ want to know that you – at the very least – give a damn.
The NTSB investigation can go forward whether Pete is there or not. And how this sickeningly lame dodge was allowed to go uncontested on a nationally broadcast TV interview is an insult to the audience’s intelligence.
