Rick Scott tells President Obama to take his high-speed rail and shove it. Why not? Hey, I’m sure Rick Scott is used to getting around in a private jet. Why should he care that a family in South Florida or Tallahassee has to drive six hours to Disney World? Or that they might not be able to buy the gas and the tickets to the park.
Let’s don’t even begin to talk about the jobs. We all know, or we would if we read the mouth-breathers who commented on this story, that only overpaid, lazy union workers would be hired to build the rail system, and that they would drag their feet and take forever to finish the job because that’s what overpaid, lazy union workers do. And the money they were paid, I mean overpaid, to build the system wouldn’t be spent to improve the American economy or to pay local taxes that support schools and cops and libraries. No, these lazy union workers would probably spend their money at Wal-Mart, so the profit would barely touch the poor non-unionized schmucks stocking the shelves and handing them their shopping carts and go straight overseas to China, which is like Wal-Mart’s Eternal Berry Patch of Happiness or something.
The comments that follow the stories in the Naples Daily News are far more informative than anything its crack team of reporters typically provides. Arguments in support of Scott, who, we are contractually required to mention, took the Fifth Amendment –– the one against incriminating yourself –– 75 times while being questioned about the billions his company ripped off from the taxpayers by overcharging Medicare, take the following approach:
• High-speed rail is a failure in this country. Look at Amtrak.This argument ignores the fact that Amtrak, while subsidized, isn’t nearly as heavily subsidized as highway transportation. Every trucking company, every strip mall developer, every clown with two acres of land withing a miles of an arterial highway, supports the expansion of highways, and therefore the extension of the gridlock that allows so many Americans to get on the phone and do business in their personal automotive cocoon, unlike in Europe where people have to sit next to strangers that include swarthy French women who don’t shave their pits and smell like a stack of stone crab traps in June.
• The people building it will be union workers, and therefore it will cost too much. See above.
• Nobody will ride it. Let me tell you something: A lot of people would be be riding it. Look around, and you’ll see an increasing number of hard-working Americans who no longer have the means to keep reliable, long-range transportation in the driveway. See the USA in your Chevrolet? Yeah, right. With gas headed toward four bucks a gallon and NEVER coming back down, no matter how many rigs we put off the coast, the average American family will be buying fuel-efficient cars that nobody would want to spend six hours in on the interstate, surrounded by crazy long-haul truckers jacked up on who-knows-what, and answering to the dispatcher watching them blip like Pong balls across the screen back at headquarters. They sure won’t be able to afford the gas.
• The rail system is another “government subsidy,” forcing us deeper into the arms of Big Brother and threatening our right to Be Free, as measured by our ability to go where we can no longer afford to go in cars we no longer can afford to buy or gas up. The subsidies that support the highway system, which serves those freight companies more than anyone else, don’t get mentioned.
We kill fifty thousand people a year on the highways, and act like we can’t do a thing about it. If the Muslims or the gay people trying to get married or the teen-aged girls choosing abortions over having a baby alone while in high school were killing that many sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, neighbors and friends, we’d declare war on them in a heartbeat. But we accept death on the highway as our unique American rite of passage, and defy anyone who challenges our right to continue the carnage.
The commenters on the Daily News site are cheerleaders for a status quo that has its fingers on the scales and declares triumphantly that the “numbers don’t lie” in pursuit of their own selfish agenda. They are short-sighted, determined to make the argument a “liberal vs. conservative” thing that they betray their own best interests, especially in the long-term.
But long-term isn’t a view that appeals to them. It’s like the “big picture,” a concept that makes them hunker down and close their minds to anything that isn’t a surefire short-term win.
So they laugh and declare themselves superior to the lemmings as they march blindly toward the cliffs they create with their ignorance and their pride, mocking those who suggest that there’s a better way forward than to “keep on trucking.”
The guy at the head of the pack, the one in the silk tights carrying the flute, is Rick Scott, the Pied Piper of Florida.
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