Bad Attitudes, Party Issues, and Pipelines

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Dec. 9, 2023

A certain former president who would like to return to the White House becomes more unhinged with each campaign rally. He has already said, right out loud, he would use another presidential term to exact “retribution” on his political enemies, meaning anyone not willing to offer him ovine fealty.

Like all petulant children, he likes to insult opponents calling them liars, losers, scum, Marxists, communists, fascists (interesting contrast there), and, in what sounded like something right out of the 1930s, referred to some as “vermin who must be rooted out.”

To be fair, he doesn’t dislike everyone. No, he’s especially fond of and publicly praises
oppressive and murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Kim Jong Un (the man he said he fell in love with), and any other autocrat whose name he can remember.

He also claims to have incontrovertible “proof” he won the 2020 election, but he seems unwilling or unable to share that information with the rest of us, likely because it’s just another Trumpian lie.

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A recent Gallup Poll indicates the public believes Republicans are better able to deal with the economy, immigration, and crime. They also believe that Democrats are better at handling environmental issues and, by a two to one margin, healthcare, including the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and abortion. So, of course, Trump and his allies have decided to attack the ACA and support a national ban on abortions. Never mind that choice has prevailed every time it has appeared on a statewide ballot, even in the brightest red states, and with 92 percent of Americans now enjoying some form of health insurance, the ACA is considerably more popular than it once was.

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Michigan’s local Republican Party organizations are still functioning and trying to reverse some of their recent losses, which is more than can be said about the state party apparatus. Having chosen an election-denying, conspiracy-spouting state executive director who wants to relitigate her own massive loss for secretary of state in 2022, it’s no wonder the disarray is rampant. The state organization is short both money and internal support, and the dissension is sufficient enough that they now want to hold their meetings over Zoom instead of in person to reduce the possibility of fisticuffs. Her chief opponent has been indicted for various shenanigans, so the state party isn’t exactly in good hands.

But it could be worse, or more salacious. The head of the Florida GOP, an ally of Governor Ron DeSantis and loud advocate for “traditional family values,” has been arrested for sexual assault including rape…and it gets stranger. He and his wife, a founder of Moms for Liberty, a group trying to take over local school boards to save our children from anything that even hints at non-traditional relationships, aren’t quite so traditional.

By his own admission, he, his wife, and another woman enjoyed at least one threesome in the past and were going to enjoy another. The allegation is his wife decided not to participate on that occasion but Mr. Executive Director would not be deterred and assaulted the third member of their little assignation. He now claims it was all consensual, you know, like traditional adultery.

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Had enough yet of the endless Enbridge print and television ads claiming to be such staunch environmentalists? Not just that, but apparently Michigan, and especially our Upper Peninsula, will practically wither away to nothing without Line 5. Yes, we will surely be doomed if we don’t continue being the conduit for fossil fuels extracted in Canada and mostly ending up in Canada but running for hundreds of miles through our state.

It’s not as if Enbridge and their pipelines have an immaculate safety record, despite their assurances to the contrary. In 2010, their Line 6B ruptured in Calhoun County, spewing what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated at 1,000,000 gallons of dirty oil into the Kalamazoo River watershed in one of the largest and most expensive inland oil spills in U.S. history. Enbridge once claimed their safety systems could detect a line break almost instantaneously, but Line 6B poured poison for nearly 17 hours. Enbridge pipelines had 10 more spills just in 2021.

The U.S. Department of Transportation says there are 2.6 million miles of fossil fuel pipelines in the country with more than 100,000 miles right here in Michigan. According to the Federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, there have been 8,000 “significant” pipeline spills nationally since they started keeping track in 1986. (They define “significant” as any incident causing injuries or death, fire or explosion, spills of more than five barrels of volatile liquids or more than 50 barrels of non-volatile liquids.)

Fossil fuel pipelines can be dangerous and always have been, regardless of what those making billions in the pipeline business claim.