Charles C. W. Cooke:
It took just a few sorry hours for the news to become politicized. On Tuesday evening, we were told of a tragedy. An Amtrak train running between New York City and Washington D.C. had derailed disastrously at Philadelphia, killing eight and wounding two hundred. By Wednesday morning, tragedy had become transgression. Speaking from the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest explained that he didn’t know for sure why the train had crashed, but that it was probably the Republicans’ fault. “We have seen a concerted effort by Republicans for partisan reasons to step in front of those kinds of advancements” that would have prevented crashes such as this one, Earnest proposed slyly. His message: “Yeah, the conservatives did it.”
Before long, this theory had become omnipresent on the Left. At PoliticsUSA, Sarah Jones complained that, “gambling with Americans lives,” “reckless Republicans” were planning to respond to the “deadly derailment with more proposed cuts to Amtrak.” At MSNBC meanwhile, erstwhile transportation expert Rachel Maddow contrived to play Sherlock Holmes. “There’s no mystery about this disaster in Philadelphia,” Maddow submitted, ‘and there will be no mystery when it happens again.” The culprit, she proposed, was a lack of infrastructure spending. “This is on Congress’s head.” Not to be outdone, Mother Jones got in on the act, too: “The Amtrak Crash,” Sam Brodey declared excitedly, “Hasn’t Stopped Republicans From Trying to Cut Its Funding.” Well, then.
In all cases, the implication was clear: The dead were dead and the injured were injured because old rails had buckled under new weights; because underserviced wheels had locked up and given out; because the electrical wires that undergird the information systems had finally disintegrated and gone back to seed. Thus was a new tragedy ghoulishly recruited to an old cause. Rare is the day on which we are not told that America’s bridges are crumbling and that its roads are cracking, and that selfish and unimaginative politicians in Washington are rendering the United States as a shadow of its former self. Rare, too, is the day on which it is not asserted by someone that if we would just have the good sense to funnel more money to our favorite groups, we would be able to escape our present economic mess. With the news of a terrible crash, the would-be spenders were given a chance to wave the bloody shirt and to put a face on an agenda. Disgracefully, they took it.
In a sensible world, this execrable line of inquiry would have been abandoned at the very moment that it was revealed that the train had been traveling at almost twice the rated speed limit when it flew off the tracks, and thus that physics, not funding, was the proximate cause of the crash. But, alas, we do not live in a sensible world. And so, rather than conceding that we should treat the questions of infrastructure spending and of Amtrak’s subsidies separately from the questions surrounding this incident, the partisans scrabbled around to find an alternate — and conveniently non-falsifiable — theory: To wit, that if more money had been available to Amtrak’s engineers, they would probably have been able to find a way of saving the deceased. Never mind that the money is already there, but is being spent elsewhere; never mind that the reason that existing “crash-preventing” technology has not been implemented has more to do with “unique” “logistical challenges” than with an absence of funding; never mind that new technology is as capable of failing as old technology. If Amtrak had just had some more money in the bank, something would have been different. If we had rendered unto Caesar what his acolytes had demanded, the laws of physics would have smiled more kindly on the Northeast.
At the Federalist yesterday, Molly Hemingway argued persuasively that this sort of magical thinking is ultimately born of a peculiar form of secular theodicy, in which money has taken the place of piety and in which all accidents, hiccups, and human mistakes can be blamed squarely upon the unwillingness of the American taxpayer to pay their April tithes with alacrity. On Twitter, Red State’s Erick Erickson concurred, writing pithily that “the leftwing reaction to the Amtrak derailment” reminded him of televangelist “Pat Robertson’s reaction when a hurricane hits somewhere.” There is, I think, a great deal of truth to this. In our debates over education, healthcare, energy, and . . . well, pretty much everything, the progressive instinct is invariably to call for more money, regardless of the nature of the problem at hand. Naturally, there is a cynical pecuniary aspect to these entreaties: behind every “for the children” plea, it seems, is a union that is looking to get its claws into your wallet. But there is also a bloody-minded refusal to accept the world as it really is. We do not, pace Thomas Paine, “have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and we never will — however many zeroes the Treasury is instructed to scrawl on its checks. Accidents happen. Humans err. Evil prevails. Perfection is a pipe dream. The question before us: How do we deal with this reality?
Since the left wants to blame a lack of funds for the wreck, then they indict themselves. For, they maxed out the $800 billion they had in the ATM with “stimulus” for just this sort of thing… then squandered it.
The money was allocated for this, but bonuses and accouterments was more important. Installing the TSC was not important until just after the trailing coach finally came to rest. Then, blaming Republicans and not letting a crisis go to waste made it important.
But, if lack of funds was the cause, Democrats are the culprits. If lack of funds is NOT the cause, then Democrats are, again, proven to be despicable liars that use tragedy to promote a failed agenda.
Such greed. Such dishonesty. Such corruption.