While Democrats and lefty journalists are blaming President Bush for the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, Twin Cities blogger John Hinderacker of Power Line has a better explanation, one that should resonate with people in North Carolina, especially Charlotte:
Over the past few years, we Minnesotans have spent something like a billion dollars of transportation money on a light rail system. “System,” actually, is too grand a term; it is a single line that runs from the Mall of America to downtown Minneapolis. Conservatives generally opposed light rail, viewing it as an inefficient boondoggle, and wanted to spend the money on road construction instead. But the liberals prevailed, and the billion dollars were spent. If we hadn’t spent that money on light rail, those dollars would have been available for other transportation projects. Like bridge repair.
Hinderacker admits that this is taking an argument to absurd lengths, but he does it to ridicule a column by Star Tribune’s crazy lefty columnist Nick Coleman, who blamed the disaster on those who have fought for lower taxes for all these years:
But it’s probably a waste of time to carry the argument that far. Transportation policy and infrastructure repair are legitimate subjects for debate, but Nick Coleman isn’t interested in them. His interest is in hate, pure and simple.