MAYOR PETE’S PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES:
Almost a year ago, the Federal Aviation Authority, under the helm of transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, announced that the aviation briefing known as NOTAM, or Notice to Airmen, would undergo a name change. NOTAMs are unclassified notices distributed from an aviation authority to all pilots that contain essential information regarding conditions, hazards, system concerns, or other flight operations. NOTAM, Mayor Pete’s Department of Transportation declared, wasn’t gender inclusive and, as of December 2, 2021, it should henceforth be referred to Notice to Air Missions, not Airmen.
While Mayor Pete preoccupied his department with scrubbing the bigotry out of an acronym, it never occurred to the Biden administration’s Chief Diversity Hire that the system itself might need some tending-to. That was until this morning when an outage caused the NOTAM system to fail and all flights in the US were grounded for several hours, something that hasn’t happened since 9/11.
Today’s FAA system failure came just weeks after Southwest Airlines ruined Christmas when its outdated computer system led to thousands of canceled flights — something that the transportation secretary brazenly mocked, seemingly unaware that the Biden administration had given billions of dollars in handouts to Southwest, with no oversight. As he wagged his finger at the airline, Mayor Pete was oblivious that his own computers might need a tune-up.
It’s a textbook example of what Victor Davis Hanson once dubbed “The Bloomberg Syndrome.” As VDH wrote in early 2011 when then-New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg failed to adequately remove a foot and half or so of global warming from his city streets:
It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.
The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.
Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official [or presidential cabinet official] holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate*, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.
* And racist roads and bridges. Don’t forget the racist roads and bridges.
