Big Pete Buttigieg, Mayor Pete himself, the greatest Secretary of Transportation in world history, has finally, at long last, made it to East Palestine, Ohio, to lay eyes on one of the worst train disasters of the last few decades:
It took Secretary Peter nearly three weeks to finally show up to the site of the transportation disaster. Now don't be too hard on our boy here. He had a lot of other things going on. I'm not sure what, but clearly he was doing something for the last 20 days.
In any event, not that we're trying to be too pointed about it, but just for kicks, here are a handful of major historical events that took way, way less time than Mayor Pete took to do what was pretty much a rock-bottom basic component of his job:
The Apollo 11 mission.
Remember that time we blasted astronauts into space, sent them on a roughly 500,000-mile-round-trip journey to another astronomical body, landed them on an alien planet surface for the first time, and brought them home safely?
Yeah, that took place July 16-24, 1969. That's eight days, about 60% quicker than it took Buttigieg to take a 55-minute flight to Pittsburgh and then ride in a motorcade to East Palestine.
The Appomattox campaign.
The last great campaign of the Civil War saw General Grant drive Union forces through the ruined rebel defenses near Petersburg, with Sheridan brilliantly routing Confederate forces at Five Forks and cutting off critical supply lines, compelling Lee to abandon both Petersburg and Richmond itself and beat a hasty retreat that would end in surrender shortly thereafter.
Those maneuvers, among the most consequential and decisive in world history, took place from the very end of March until the second week of April — about 11 days, all told, barely half of what it took Secretary Pete to hop in a government-funded car and drive up the interstate for a day-trip.
The Titanic's maiden voyage.
It's probably the most famous ship's voyage in world history. And it was a one-and-done, over in fewer than five days. Mayor Pete took four times as long to visit East Palestine as it took for the Titanic to sail and sink.
The Dunkirk evacuation.
The Miracle of Dunkirk stands as one of the greatest tactical victories in Western military history. Cut off and surrounded by German forces, a great mass of more than 300,000 Allied forces looked on the verge of being annihilated. And yet they were quickly rescued by a combination of scant military resources and "little ships" piloted by pleasure boaters and merchants. Churchill warned later that "wars are not won by evacuations," but it is likely World War II would have been lost without this one.
The Miracle took about eight days — which is to say a badly taxed military and a flotilla of English socialites evacuated an entire fighting force in just under one-half the time it took Mayor Pete to go to Ohio.
