Last night, a passenger plane collided with a Blackhawk helicopter over the Potomac River, killing all 64 people on board, many of them champion figure skaters coming from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita on Sunday. Three service-members on the helicopter were killed too. This was an entirely preventable tragedy as a breakdown in procedure was likely behind it, as Guy Gratton, an associate professor of aviation and the environment at Britain’s Cranfield University, told The Washington Post that while he did not want to speculate, “it’s clear two aircraft were in the same place at the same time and they shouldn’t have been.”
Donald Trump, president of the United States, posted about it like he was just a helpless observer like everyone else, writing “Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”
In a world where personal responsibility was actually valued and wasn’t just a talking point uttered by a bunch of bad people who like to watch Americans in states like California suffer, Duffy, Trump and raging abusive alcoholic and new head of the Department of Defense Pete Hegseth would be getting their feet held to the fire. They are in charge, they slashed funding directly related to air traffic control upon entering office, and Hegseth was on Fox News ranting about DEI when the crash occurred. Democrats should be demanding to know how the Trump administration let this happen, whether it is connected to their actions to slash budgets, and where the buck actually stops because Republicans are avoiding the responsibilities they were elected to manage.
If asking simple questions of the people in power is politicizing a tragedy, then America is unfixable and our government will continue to deteriorate. Some in influential positions in media are demanding that people don’t politicize this, pointing out that there may be a nuanced explanation for how this occurred that doesn’t easily line up with “Trump pulled FAA funding and then a plane crashed into a military helicopter.” That could wind up being true, but the fact of the matter is that Trump’s actions make what happened last night more likely, and pointing that out has the potential to save lives. If any politician is more fearful of the backlash from the GOP and media than staying silent and having blood on their hands, then they are too cowardly to serve the American people. Demanding that people don’t politicize tragedies is a way of politicizing them yourself, as you assume that your political position is manifestly right and anyone fighting for a better world is being unnecessarily political. This is the kind of mindless Very Serious thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.
It is not dishonoring the victims’ lives to fight to prevent this from happening again. It is honoring their lives and using their loss as a catalyst to save other people’s lives. Some Democrats and their sycophants in media and politics are pushing the party to stay quiet while braindead Republicans like Andy Ogles blame this on DEI and whistleblowers tell Ken Klippenstein that this is a dynamic to fear in many airports facing cuts, like in San Francisco. Democrats have a choice: they can do their jobs, or be complicit in GOP negligence that will get people killed.
This is the same dynamic around guns that Democrats have failed to fight against that has led to gun violence being the largest cause of death for children in America. They let Republicans define the playing field and then react to conditions they create that favor them. The net result of this is more Republican policies getting passed which lead to more death. At a certain point, any Democrat not fighting back against administrative incompetence like this is complicit in the GOP’s goal to immiserate or kill everyone in America with a net worth under seven figures. Politicizing tragedies is good, actually, because if it leads to policy changes, it prevents future tragedies. That some folks don’t get this just demonstrates how politics is just a game to them, not a matter of life and death.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
