When the WaPo ain’t even on your side, it’s time for the Democrats to give up the ship. Or the train wreck, as the case may be.
I mean the ship part figuratively, of course, but the train-wreck part literally; in the three-odd weeks since the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, President Joe Biden’s administration has been implicitly blaming former President Donald Trump for the wreck, claiming he rolled back standards on brakes for freight trains carrying hazardous materials.
Here’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, for instance, saying on Twitter that the administration was “constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015), but we are using the powers we do have to keep people safe.”
We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015), but we are using the powers we do have to keep people safe. https://t.co/xRyyYpGOwd
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) February 14, 2023
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Now, granted, despite Harry Truman’s famous maxim, the norm for U.S. presidential administrations has been to say that the buck stops with the guy who held office before me. (Provided, of course, he was of the opposing party.)
However, in the Biden administration’s case, these are a set of very specific allegations, all mostly to deflect from the fact the administration bungled the response, at the very least from a public relations standpoint. (Buttigieg, for instance, didn’t visit East Palestine until over two weeks after the accident — and President Biden still hasn’t visited or announced a visit.)
And, at least in the estimation of head Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, complete bunkum.
Now, granted, Kessler wasn’t fact-checking the numerous implications by Biden officials that the regulatory changes under the Trump administration caused the wreck, at least not directly. Instead, he was fact-checking Trump’s own assertion that “I had nothing to do with it.”
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