East Palestinians see red over Biden’s politics

Last week must have been especially rough for the people still living in the contaminated eastern Ohio town of East Palestine.

On Tuesday, only hours after the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor was knocked down by an out-of-control container ship, they had to watch President Joe Biden come on national TV and promise to “move heaven and earth” to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge “as soon as humanly possible.”

They also had to see Biden pledge to have the federal government pay the entire cost of the accident and hear him say he plans to visit Baltimore as “quickly” as he can.

As extra punishment, sick and depressed people of East Palestine also had to watch Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg perform his annoying act at a one-hour press conference.

I can’t imagine how mad the nearly 5,000 people still left in East Palestine must have been after seeing Biden and Buttigieg rush to Baltimore’s rescue with all federal resources blazing.

Biden waited more than a year to visit them and feel their community’s pain after a train derailment Feb. 3, 2023, started fires that poisoned their whole town with a cloud of toxic chemicals.

Baltimore’s fallen bridge is a major disaster that should be repaired as quickly as possible by the Biden administration and the federal government.

But so was repairing the daily lives of the victims of the train derailment in East Palestine.

For the last 14 months their lives have been in constant turmoil, their health has been in danger and their futures have been scientifically scary and uncertain.

They are still getting their homes tested for toxins, still wondering if the chemicals they inhaled or drank is the reason they are always sick or depressed.

Many East Palestinians want to leave but can’t sell their homes because their property values have been decimated, and their town is now an American Chernobyl.

Activists are arguing that the federal government needs to put an end to their suffering now, and they’re right.

They say the feds – i.e., Biden and his administration — should offer to buy everyone’s home, compensate people who want to move away, and, as was done at Love Canal and Camp Lejeune, pay for the medical costs of people who were exposed to toxic chemicals.

When everything is as fixed as it can be, the final bill should be sent to Norfolk Southern Railroad.

The people of East Palestine have every right to be angry at Biden and the shoddy way they’ve been treated by his government.

They’re victims of the worst kind of partisan politics.

They had the bad luck to be living in a red part of a red state – an Ohio county that went 71-26 for Donald Trump in 2020.

If they had been living in a Blue State like Pennsylvania, which is only 3 miles east, or Maryland, we know things would have been much different.

Biden and Buttigieg would have been seen by the whole country walking the polluted streets, farms and creek beds of East Palestine while the toxic fires still smoldered.

The Biden administration’s cold shoulder to Ohio’s Republicans and its bottomless concern for Maryland’s Democrats is a textbook example of cynical partisanship – not that the major media and their stable of liberal pundits noticed or cared.

Fake journalists like Chuck Todd and professional Trump haters like Morning Joe & Mika were too busy being distraught last week – in public – over NBC’s smart decision to hire ex-RNC boss Ronna McDaniel as a conservative commentator.

She would have made a nice Republican version of Jen Psaki or George Stephanopoulos – former Democrat Party hacks who now pass as TV pundits and journalists.

But Chuck and Joe – who pretend to be advocates of democracy and ideological diversity – went ape for four days until they got NBC’s cowardly executives to fire a person after four days because she might not agree with their partisan opinions 110% of the time.

Wake up, America.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.