It seems like ancient history now, but in the fall of 2021, not so long ago, America's supply chains came close to snapping. Remember this? More than 100 cargo ships were floating idly off the coast of L.A. and Long Beach. Those were the two biggest ports on the West Coast. Those ships were filled with consumer goods bound for stores and consumers across the country, but they couldn't offload them. There's no place to do it.
The containers just sat there and in any case, thanks to the Biden administration's vaccine mandates, there weren't enough truckers to pick up the cargo and take it anywhere. So, all of that combined to create the worst shipping bottleneck in memory, and it lasted for months. The price of transporting goods to this country rose by 600%. So, if you're wondering why inflation started to go up, that's a big part of the reason.
Now, none of this happened by accident. The bottleneck was a man-made disaster, and it could have been, should have been, fixed by the people in charge of transportation. They're called the Department of Transportation.
But for much of the time this disaster was unfolding, Joe Biden's secretary of transportation, that would be Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, was completely disengaged. He wasn't on the job. He was at home. He was unpaid paternity leave, posing for selfies for social media.
Now, Buttigieg didn't seem embarrassed at all by this. "This is work," he said, though, in fact, he had played no role whatsoever in giving birth to a child. "It may be time away from a professional role, but it's very much time on" and actually, it was time on – time on television, Pete Buttigieg used his time to appear on various shows, including "The View" on ABC, where he spoke at length about his favorite subject, which is himself. Not the container disaster – "Me, me, me, me, me, me, me"
Meanwhile, the ships stacked up outside the ports and inflation went up. So, that should conclusively have been the end of Pete Buttigieg's career as transportation secretary. Back to McKinsey for you. Whatever you think of his personal journey of self-discovery, there was an emergency in progress and Buttigieg ignored it.
If anything is grounds for firing somebody, it's that, but the Biden administration did not fire Pete Buttigieg. They did the opposite. They praised him for breaking some important, but not very well-defined glass ceiling of some sort that you're supposed to be excited about. They rewarded his dereliction of duty.
So, because people do respond to incentives, Pete Buttigieg kept doing it. He kept proudly ignoring his job. Weeks after a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, causing an actual environmental disaster throughout the whole region, Pete Buttigieg as of tonight has still not visited East Palestine. Why? What has he been doing? Well, as he explained to the Daily Caller reporter last night. He's taking more personal time.
REPORTER: What do you have to say to the folks in Ohio, in East Palestine who are suffering right now?
PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well, I'd refer you to about a dozen interviews I've given today and if you'd like to arrange a conversation, be sure to reach out to our press office. I'm not going to have that conversation with you just walking down the street here.
REPORTER: You don't have a message for them?
BUTTIGIEG: I do, and I shared it with the press many times today. I'd refer you to those comments.
REPORTER: Do you mind sharing it with us?
BUTTIGIEG: No. I'm going to refer to the comments that I made to the press because right now I'm taking some personal time and I'm walking down the street.
REPORTER: Are you going down there?
BUTTIGIEG: What's that?
REPORTER: Are you going down there at all?
BUTTIGIEG: Yeah, I am.
REPORTER: When are you going?
BUTTIGIEG: I'll share that when I'm ready.
REPORTER: Ok, thank you.
BUTTIGIEG: Can I get a photo with you?
I'm taking some personal time. Not just a robot, but a nasty one. Can I get a photo of you? And then he did. Now you wonder what Pete Buttigieg is going to do with that photo. Makes you shiver a little bit if you think too much about it, so we're going to stop.
Meanwhile, outside Mayor Pete's nifty little cocoon of bistros and Instagram selfies, life goes on in America and in many places it is getting tougher, not that he cares even a little bit. Here's the mayor of East Palestine on February 16 nearly two weeks after the derailment, explaining that he'd heard nothing from Pete Buttigieg. Watch.
RESIDENT: Where is Pete Buttigieg? Where's he at?
MAYOR: I don't know. Your guess is as good as me. Yesterday was the first time I heard anything from the White House.
That was last week. He still didn't go. This week, people in East Palestine are coughing up blood. We know that because we talked to a couple of them last night, but still, Pete Buttigieg has not shown up. Donald Trump has, by the way; he went today. He's not able to fix the problem. It's not like he's the Secretary of Transportation.
But Trump did bring pallets of bottled water and then bought the entire fire department dinner at McDonald's. Whatever you think of Trump, at least he cared enough to go there. That's something. In fact, it's enough to make you wonder how someone who clearly doesn't care at all, not even a little bit, who doesn't even care enough to pretend he cares, wound up with one of the most important jobs in the Biden cabinet, a job with actual responsibilities. How did he do that?
Well, we know what the answer is. No, Pete Buttigieg doesn't know anything about transportation. We would bet money he can't drive a stick shift. On the other hand, Pete Buttigieg is gay. He plays the piano and he speaks Norwegian. Let's hire him. Watch.
EPA CHIEF, OHIO GOVERNOR DRINK TAP WATER NEAR TRAIN DERAILMENT SITE AFTER HEAVY CRITICISM
STEPHANIE RUHLE, MSNBC: There he was yesterday, front and center, now third in the polls with a speech that many have said are historic.
JEFF MASON,REUTERS: He's inspirational so far and that's something that voters absolutely want.
YASMIN VOSSOUGHIAN, MSNBC: He has this appeal for a lot of reasons. He is a veteran. He is openly gay. He is from Indiana
SUNNY HOSTIN TO BUTTIGIEG: You are a concert pianist. You speak many languages, including Norwegian, that you learned because you wanted to read a book.
JOY BEHAR, ABC HOST: The second coming of Obama. We'll see about that. My prayers may have been answered, if that's true.
KATE BOLDUAN, CNN HOST: The draw to this point has been young, fresh, positive and to change agent.
NICOLLE WALLACE: This guy is chicken soup for my soul.
ANOTHER TRAIN DERAILS IN MIDWEST AS PETE BUTTIGIEG ANNOUNCES VISIT TO OHIO CRASH SITE
So, you sort of long to see Pete Buttigieg fired from his job. It's nothing personal. Not many people hate Pete Buttigieg. What Pete Buttigieg is actually like or how well his Norwegian actually is, is irrelevant. You long to see him fired because you long to see someone at some point held accountable for disasters.
When the Biden administration pulled out of Afghanistan and armed the Taliban with one of the largest militaries in the entire region, no one was punished. The only person in the U.S. military that we're aware of who was punished for that debacle was the guy who complained about it. That's it. No one was ever punished for COVID. When it turns out the vaccines didn't do what they thought they were – what they told us they were going to do – when the lockdowns hurt more people than they helped, when Fauci was caught lying about virtually everything, not one person was punished.
So, it would be encouraging to see someone punished for this debacle for the thousand trail derailments, train derailments we have every year as people, as Pete Buttigieg blithely informed us the other day. But Pete Buttigieg has not been fired, and he likely won't be. Why is that?
Well, we're thinking it's because he's on board with the core idea of the Biden administration, and that is equity and equity means we're going to make decisions based on how you look. Pete Buttigieg is all in on that. Watch him explain that actually, all lives don't matter.
REPORTER: In 2015, You said that all lives matter when you spoke about two police controversies that were happening in South Bend. Was that a mistake?
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BUTTIGIEG: What I did not understand at that time was that, that phrase, just early into mid especially 2015, was coming to be viewed as a sort of counter slogan to Black Lives Matte. And so there's this statement that seems very anodyne and something that kind of nobody could be against actually wound up being used to devalue what the Black Lives Matter movement was telling us. Since learning about how that phrase was being used to push back on that activism, I stopped using it in that context.
Imagine apologizing for saying all lives matter. No, they actually don't all matter, says the head of the Department of Transportation and you can see now that he means it. A train derails on his watch in a town full of high school educated Trump voters who nobody cares about and have been left behind, and they are further ignored.
But that's not environmental racism. No, it's equity. So, clearly, he knows all lives don't matter, and he's being rewarded for it.
