Editorials by Bob

This past Spring, Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) made a comment that Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta should resign his post. Since then, the movement for his resignation, growing largely from his comments regarding Amtrak, has been slowly but steadily growing, with members of congress joining in from both sides of the aisle.

Count me in.

Normally I'm not one to say something negative about someone, especially by name (my tirade of earlier this week notwithstanding), but this is one of those few cases where, after some deliberation, I've decided that an exception (that is, a deliberate exception) must be made. The man is a public hazard, and unlike the danger of a certain motion picture director very few people are pointing out the problem publicly.

The National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) has spent most of this year trying to publicly correct misstatements Mineta has made in pushing the "Zero Subsidy" package he urged on President Bush at budget time early this year. They've had so many corrections to make just this year that they've added an entirely new section to their website, here.

If you've just clicked on the link, you've probably noticed that Mineta isn't the only one making erroneous, false, or outrageous statements. But if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see he made the earliest and most ridiculous.

One of the most interesting is this, given on March 31: "Californians give Amtrak over 27 million of their tax dollars each year to operate the San Joaquins service between Oakland and the Central Valley. And what do they get for their investment? Trains that are late more than 44 percent of the time." Either Mr. Mineta hadn't heard about the levee break and flooding washing out the track between Martinez and Stockton, or was somehow trying to blame it on Amtrak.

Another real winner, from a week earlier: "The problem is if the Empire Builder is going from Seattle to Chicago and it's going through lets say Montana, but there are only 53 people a day using that train service, can I really justify pouring that kind of subsidy into the Empire Builder for a segment of that service?" Why did he say 53 people a day, when Amtrak's own statistics (easily available to him, as Secretary of Transportation) put the number at 1,195? Where on Earth did he get the 53 a day -- was he looking only at people who board or disembark in Seattle and Chicago, or something?

Throughout the debacle of the whole Zero Subsidy proposal -- and NARP also has a page here about that -- Mineta has tried to portray Amtrak as a losing proposition, "running trains that nobody rides between cities that nobody wants to travel between," even in the very face of the reality that, over the past four years (since David Gunn took the helm), Amtrak has been posting record ridership. Far from the scores of empty trains he's trying to project, the trains tend to be full -- if you want to take the train somewhere, especially on an overnight trip, you'd better book early.

The biggest shocker of all came after he met with NARP representatives and listened to their corrections. They gave him many of the facts of the matter, including what really would happen to Amtrak if it wasn't given adequate funding to stay out of bankruptcy, and he went right out a week later and unfolded more lies.

What is this man's agenda? I admit I don't know much about his background prior to government service. Does he have some kind of shady connections to the oil, automotive, or airline industries? Does he have some sort of plan to profit personally from the collapse of the American transportation infrastructure after all those rail passengers are forced onto the highways and into the airways?

No, never mind what sort of connections President Bush or anyone else might or might not have. I'm talking about Mineta specifically here, and why he thinks destroying Amtrak through deliberate falsehood is the way to operate.

Please note that I'm not accusing here. I'm honestly asking. If I had any solid evidence, or even specific indications, of corruption other than the actual false statements themselves, you can bet I'd give them here. But I don't, and I'd really like to know what's going on here.

But let's assume for a moment that Mr. Mineta is being completely honest, and actually believes what he's been saying. It's not entirely impossible; in fact, I'd say it's the more likely probability. But if that's the case, then Norman Mineta actually believes (or at least believed when he said it) that Amtrak was responsible for the delays caused by the levee break, that there were only 53 passengers a day on the Empire builder and not 1,195, that Amtrak really could survive bankruptcy, and all the rest. It would mean that our Secretary of Transportation has a demonstrated inability to get his facts straight.

Secretary Mineta may indeed be that clueless. After all, he's not really in a good position to know anything about Amtrak. This is by his own actions. As Rep. Corrinne Brown (D-FL) recently pointed out, he never attends the Amtrak board meetings himself, even though he's a member; he always sends a representative. And if he never attends an Amtrak board meeting, how can he know anything about Amtrak?

Given a menu where one choice is corruption and the other is abject stupidity, I think I'd go to a different restaurant.

Either way, Mineta has no credibility. Either way, Mineta is openly contradicting information that he should easily have available, if only because most of it is easily available to the public. Either way, Mineta is an active danger to our nation's transportation infrastructure. Either way, Mineta's presence on the Cabinet can only hurt the President's already-shaky (or, in the eyes of many liberals, nigh-nonexistent) credibility.

Either way, it's time for Norman Mineta to leave. Say, could we get Tommy Thompson in there instead?