Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the son of a hardcore Marxist academic, was a good student who managed to get himself into Harvard and, from there, win a Rhodes Scholarship. He is glib and, with his sonorous voice, makes nonsense and banality sound profound. When it comes to actual skills, though, he comes up short. He was an utterly average mayor of South Bend but is proving to be, not just an ineffective Transportation Secretary but an anti-effective one. It’s becoming obvious to all that he was an affirmative action appointee.

I won’t rehash Buttigieg’s history. You can read a bit more about him here. It was a history that left him manifestly unqualified to be president, although his ego is such that he truly believed he was suited and prepared for the job, and that is now proving to leave him equally unqualified for the job of Transportation Secretary. In that role, it turns out that Buttigieg’s sole leftist obsession is to remedy the scourge of racist roads in America.

The claim of some racist roads is not totally crackpot-ish. The reality is that, when modern car-based transportation arose in America, putting modern roads on the agenda, affluent people (i.e., White people) didn’t want freeways, highways, and massive city roads running through their neighborhoods. Those roads, therefore, were deliberately placed in poor communities, which often meant Black communities. And there is evidence that, in some cities, roads were built to make it harder for “undesirables” (e.g., Black people) to gain easy access to affluent communities.

Image: Pete Buttigieg (edited) by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

These wrongs were not equal across America and they occurred, on average, at least 60-70 years ago. They’re one of the tragedies of the racism Democrats tried to build into America’s fabric but they are in the past. Nevertheless, they’re Pete Buttigieg’s number one agenda item:

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg launched a $1 billion project on Thursday to fix America’s racist infrastructure system.

Buttigieg launched the Reconnecting Communities program, a “first-of-its-kind” anti-racist infrastructure project aimed at rebuilding communities that were “racially segregated or divided by road projects,” reported the Associated Press.

That’s all a nice hobby horse for a guy with access to a billion in taxpayer funds. However, the real problems affecting all Americans today, regardless of skin color, are supply chain shortages, canceled flights, and skyrocketing fuel prices that affect their ability to get to work.

You haven’t heard much about the supply chain issue lately but it’s rearing up again (as the empty shelves at stores attest). On the West Coast, the unions are making demands:

On Friday the collective-bargaining agreement covering longshore labor along the West Coast expires, and with it the contract’s “no strike” clause. This will allow 22,400 dockworkers to walk off the job at any time until a new contract is ratified. Negotiations began in May and could take months. A strike would shut down 29 ports, including the adjacent Los Angeles and Long Beach complex, which handles 47% of containerized imports from China and other Asian manufacturing centers.

Buttigieg should be on this like white on rice. But he isn’t. Biden met with the heads of the unions at issue but Buttigieg doesn’t seem to be involved.

When it comes to fuel prices, Buttigieg is also absent. Well, that is if you ignore him telling people that they should get an electric car or his denying that Biden’s policies (which definitely caused rising fuel prices) had anything to do with rising fuel prices and, of course, his assurance that nothing can be done to fix the problem.

Most recently, Buttigieg brought his unique ineptitude to the problem of flight cancellations across America. I’ve been informed recently that the problem stems from airlines offering wonderful early retirement packages to pilots to stop their money from hemorrhaging during the lockdowns. I assume that high fuel prices, supply chain problems, and other issues are bedeviling the airline industry too.

This is precisely the kind of thing a Transportation Secretary should be working on 24/7 to keep American air travel functional. But not Buttigieg. Instead, like a customer service agent, he shared with people helpful hints on getting refunds with canceled flights, complete with his own story about doing so:

For example, my connecting flight got canceled last night. At first, the airline offered 2500 miles, which I estimate is worth about 30 bucks.

But I claimed the refund for the canceled portion instead, and it worked out to be $112.07.

— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) July 2, 2022

Learn more at our aviation consumer protection website https://t.co/cnBRtNvVZl

— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) July 2, 2022

Pete Buttigieg: Not just useless at his assigned task (for which he gets paid $221,400 per year) but offensively useless. Given that he’s incapable of doing good in his job, let’s just hope that, during his tenure, he doesn’t cause too much lasting damage.