Obama’s latest Bushism: “We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad”

posted at 11:18 am on September 24, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Double Standards ]   

Standing in front of an aging bridge that links Covington, Kentucky,and Cincinnati, the president this week made another impassioned pitch for his son-of-stimulus $447-billion jobs bill. He told those assembled that replacing the bridge behind him, which he correctly noted is “on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America,” would put idle construction crews back to work.

Indeed it would—eventually. Even if Congress were to write a check for the $2.3 billion the project would cost, work on it would not start for another four years.

But that was the least of the boo-boos the president committed while using the bridge as a visual aid. He also made a pitch for another of his pet projects: replacing the nation’s centuries-plus-old railroads with a system of moderately high-speed electric trains. Volumes have been written about the false comparison between transportation system in China, whose high-speed rail the president holds aloft as a model, and that of the U.S. This didn’t prevent Obama from telling the crowd:

Now, we used to have the best infrastructure in the world here in America. We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad, the Interstate Highway System. We built the Hoover Dam. We built the Grand Central Station.

So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads? And let Europe build the best highways? And have Singapore build a nicer airport? [Emphasis added]

Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Timespounced on this latest “Bushism”:

A railroad between continents? A railroad from, say, New York City all the way across the Atlantic to France? Now, THAT would be a bridge!

So whose ass does the president kick for this malapropism? Is it his speech writers who confused the prefixes trans- and inter-? Or was Obama ad-libbing, as he was when he made reference to the “Austrian language?” Or when he claimed while lobbying for auto industry bailouts that “the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it”? (The German Karl Benz is generally acknowledged as the inventor of the modern car.)

But Obama’s biggest gaffe of all may be the timing of his mention of his beloved high-speed railinitiative. Two days before his bridge-side rally, the Democrat-controlled Senate Appropriations subcommittee that sets the Transportation Department’s budget cut the requested $53 billion funding for the program through 2018. It makes it look as though the president isn’t paying attention.

A final word about high-speed trains and the liberal mindset. In July, one of China’s vaunted high-speed trains smashed into another that was stalled on a section of track in Zhejiang province. The accident killed 32 people and injured scores of others. If such a disaster were to occur in the U.S., would the nation’s putative high-speed rail system go the way of nuclear power plants? Maybe before we leap into the expenditure for a redundant transportation project, liberals should examine photographs of the wreckage of the Chinese train. They could even come up with a nifty term to defend their fear of high-speed rail projects. They could call it “the China syndrome.”

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