President Joe Biden appointed Pete Buttigieg to be the Secretary of Transportation.
It was a big deal because he was the first openly gay Secretary appointed and confirmed.
(We don’t count Rich Grenell because of some technicality that would give a Republican credit for something like this.)
Secretary Pete then went on a three months of maternity leave in the middle of a supply chain crisis and nobody noticed until Fox News asked some questions.
The supply chain is still fucked, evidenced by continued bare shelves and the skyrocketing prices of everything that requires a computer chip.
Secretary Pete then went stumping for Biden’s infrastructure bill claiming that our bridges and overpasses are racist.
It turns out that he got the “r” word wrong, they are rusty and collapsing.
Then we all find out that the infrastructure money that was going to be spent wasn’t even going to fix the bridge in Pittsburgh that fell down because the money was earmarked for bullshit like bike paths for rich people to go to Whole Foods or for rich people to have more subsidized charging stations for their Teslas.
He can’t fix the supply chain crisis. He can’t fix the bridges. What can he do?
Secretary Pete made the ambitious claim he was going to end traffic fatalities.
Impossible, but why not try.
Pete Buttigieg: "Our goal is zero deaths. A country where one day nobody has to say goodbye to a loved one because of a traffic crash." pic.twitter.com/mmoNfvAvGN
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 27, 2022
How is he going to do that?
He is going to turn America into the world’s most surveilled police state by spending billions to put speed cameras everywhere.
A camera on every street corner to ensure traffic safety.
That won’t ever be turned against us in the most malicious possible way, right?
The government will be far more efficient at levying fines on you for going 10 miles over the speed limit while driving on your pothole degraded road or over your rusted out bridge on you way to the store with half bare shelves.
Because that’s how tyrants are.
They can’t actually fix any of your problems.
Then can put a secret police officer or camera on every corner to intimidate and punish the citizenry.
We have ways of dealing with those here in Tennessee:
https://www.timesnews.net/news/local-news/charges-dismissed-in-knoxville-red-light-camera-shooting/article_813007b9-c106-5728-9941-222f06b8f747.html
The uk is littered with cameras. Especially london. I have family there. Its a camera filled utopia, no crime anymore…..In the real world the cameras did zip to quell crime..more nanny state do nothing pandering.
Zero deaths?
Ban all wheeled vehicles!
It’s for the childrenz or something.
And…. he has demonstrated that he has no clue where these deaths are coming from.
I do not have the data handy, but I remember reading that overwhelmingly the deaths on the roads are from vehicle on pedestrian/bicycle collisions. I am pretty sure strictly enforcing speed limits is not going to change the outcome when some idiot decides to walk into traffic without looking.
Happily, smart tyrants are rare, very rare indeed. Smart tyrants with the charisma to get people to want to follow them are even more rare.
Bad Touch Grandpa’s merry band of incompetents aren’t smart. And Unfunny Gay Mr. Bean is neither smart nor charismatic.
I was just thinking about Joe Biden’s cabinet. A few have vanished without a trace — Interior and Agriculture, which makes sense; they are meaningless do-nothing departments that rarely cause trouble, though of course their very existence is unconstitutional. But across the board I can’t think of a single cabinet secretary who has even a very mild level of competence. Nearly all of them are blatant examples of affirmative action losers. (I include Marty Walsh, SecLabor, in that category; his “protected class” is “Labor Union Boss”.) Many of them are utterly and completely worthless; Pete B is certainly one of them, but the secretaries of labor, commerce, education, and energy are also prime examples of useless people hired only because of their identity categories and not because they possessed any qualification whatsoever for that or any other job. Blinken and Austin are not quite in that category: I rate them as only 90% incompetent rather than 100%.
In years past we had the Peter Principle, about people hired above their level of competence. Then there was the Dilbert Principle, about promoting the incompetent to get them out of the way.
Now, we have the Biden Principle- where people dumber & more incompetent than the boss are hired, to supposedly keep them from making him look like an idiot.
It’s not working.
Even in almost Gun Free Britain they shoot the damned things. They also paint over, bash, and burn the cameras.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/sep/07/transport.ukcrime
https://www.crewechronicle.co.uk/news/local-news/speed-camera-destroyed-danger-road-5662369
Health and Safety!
Growing up in Holland in the 1970s, “radar cameras” were appearing all over the place: the cops would send you a speeding ticket because some camera somewhere had observed a car going to fast and it seemed to have your license plate. The Dutch responded by spraying their license plates with hair spray, which apparently reflected enough of the camera flash bulb to wreck the picture, without making the license plate unreadable to humans (which would have been a ticketable offense). In New England, simple dirt would serve, after all wet dirt roads splatter enough dirt on the plates you can’t see what is on them anymore. “Dirt on my license plate, officer? Well, I live on a dirt road, you know…”
Grenell wouldn’t count for two reasons: first is he was appointed to DNI, which isn’t a cabinet level position, and second, he was only acting, not Senate confirmed.