VOYAGE OF THE DAMMED: Pete Buttigieg Comparing Biden Admin Accomplishments To Construction Of Hoover Dam Is A Massive Fail:
This administration’s been nothing short of a disaster on all fronts.
But that doesn’t stop people like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg from bragging about it. Get a load of this ridiculous comparison:
I'm confident that a century from now, future Americans will look back on the work we’ve done—much as we look at the Hoover Dam—and see how the Biden-Harris Administration's "Big Deal" for infrastructure made big things possible. pic.twitter.com/SQEjzm8Mi6
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) December 31, 2024
Puh-leeze! If this bunch was in office when the money was appropriated in the late 1920s to construct the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, the thing still wouldn’t be finished. But for politicians and bureaucrats like Biden, Buttigieg and the rest, the goal is to get the money spent — actually building anything isn’t really a primary concern.
QED, this June Washington Times article: Americans still waiting on Biden broadband plan; rural high-speed internet stuck in Dems’ red tape.
Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.
Lawmakers and internet companies blame the slow rollout on burdensome requirements for obtaining the funds, including climate change mandates, preferences for hiring union workers and the requirement that eligible companies prioritize the employment of “justice-impacted” people with criminal records to install broadband equipment.
Back in 2011, Rachel Maddow was making equally dam-able (sorry) comparisons in a promo ad for MSNBC that was shot by fellow leftist Spike Lee:
Maddow’s last sentence in the ad is this howler:
This is a project of national significance. We’ve got those projects on the menu right now. And we’ve got to figure out whether or not we are still a country that can think this big.
And the answer from the Obama administration, as Joel Kotkin noted at the Politico last fall is…No We Can’t!
When FDR commissioned projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, he literally brought light to darkened regions. The loyalty created by FDR and Truman built a base of support for liberalism that lasted for nearly a half-century.
Today’s liberals don’t show enthusiasm for airports or dams — or anything that may kick up some dirt. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Deanna Archuleta, for example, promised a Las Vegas audience: “You will never see another federal dam.”
Last year, Jonah Goldberg noted the environmentalist Catch-22 that has boxed-in the left. “Liberalism has become a cargo cult to the New Deal, but many of the achievements of the New Deal would be impossible now. Just try to get a Hoover Dam built today.”
And as Kevin Williamson noted at the time about Maddow’s damming (again, sorry) ad:
Conventional political theory holds that only the state can provide public goods such as parks, sidewalks, roads, and the like. Television commentator Rachel Maddow offered a typically exaggerated expression of this view when she visited the Hoover Dam and remarked, “When you are this close to Hoover Dam, it makes you realize how small a human is in relation to this as a human project. You can’t be the guy who builds this. You can’t even be the state that builds this. You have to be the country that builds this.” (Never mind that Hoover Dam was in fact built by a consortium of private firms headed by Bechtel-Kaiser, under precisely the sort of outsourcing/private contractor arrangement that Maddow has no time for in most other contexts — in fact, she includes a chapter in one of her books denouncing this practice.)
In a sense, Maddow is correct — the Hoover Dam is an economically nonviable project from the time of its conception, and the mighty installation, visually impressive as it is, produces significantly less electricity than does a typical small nuclear power plant. Which is to say, it is a majestic boondoggle. Only politics can do that — and stay in business. And, needless to say, a “guy” attempting a project with the environmental impact of Hoover Dam would never get permission from environmental regulators, given that its construction entailed wiping out an entire local ecosystem.
Like Jimmy Carter kicking off in the late 1970s the sort of deregulation that would be the hallmark of the Reagan era and its go-go economy, it’s good to see Mayor Pete (and Maddow before him) inadvertently championing the sort of free enterprise (and particularly inadvertently, safe clean environmentally friendly nuclear power) that will be features of the second Trump era beginning later this month.
In any case, as we noted last night, the job of transportation secretary will soon have a major personnel upgrade:
