Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, visits East Palestine and proceeds to make a mess of things.

The Alex Murdoch trial gets dramatic with the defendant taking the stand, and we deconstruct

Miley Cyrus's hit song, flowers. I'm Bench Bureau. This is The Bench Bureau Show.

Well, folks, there are certain jobs in the federal government that are supposed to be

Cushed jobs. Secretary of Transportation is one of those jobs. You haven't really heard of past

secretaries of transportation. Quick, name the last three. You can't, because no one's

ever heard of that particular secretary. There are certain secretaries you've heard of,

the secretaries of state or the secretaries of defense. And then there are a bunch that you

really never think about, like the Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of Transportation, but they actually do have real jobs. Now, Pete Buttigieg has never treated the Transportation Department like a real job. He's always treated it as though it's essentially a giant photo op, which is why there are videos of him riding his bike around Washington, D.C., after taking his bike out of the back of a car. It's the reason why he was appearing mostly on the news for the first year of his existence, as Secretary of Transportation, as a new father who had taken off two months for no apparent reason, and then had not come back until people noticed that he was gone. Pete Buttigieg has never taken his job particularly seriously, because let's be real about this. The executive branch is filled with non-serious job. Secretary of transportation, it can be serious, but can also be a cush job. And this is particularly true for Pete Buttigieg, who is a media creation, who's been protected by the media, built by the media, and guarded by the media. And like a hot house flower, Pete Buttigieg, when exposed to the elements,

immediately wilt. And this is exactly what we are seeing in East Palestine, Ohio. I'm not sure I've

ever seen a politician implode in as dramatic a fashion as Pete Buttigieg is currently imploding.

Now, again, he should have imploded after he took two months off for paternity leave and no one

noticed. At that point, everybody should have said, oh, he's a career useless person, got it. But no, instead, they decided that they were going to make him a hero of the republic, trademark. They were going to make him a hero of the republic because he was showing fathers everywhere where it meant to be a good dad with your husband at home, having pushed the baby out. Well, no, actually, in any case, he was a hero of the Republic.

And that maintained, right?

He was a prospective presidential candidate.

People in the Democratic Party were talking about how Kamala Harris was off at her job,

Drew, and Pete Buttigieg was the heir apparent to the old man.

If Joe Biden fell down on the job, it would be young Pete Buttigieg fresh-faced directly from the cover of Mad Magazine, who is going to bring the Democratic forward into the new age.

After all, he was intersectional.

I mean, he was a white dude, but he was a gay white dude.

And that meant that he would be the perfect candidate for president of the United States for a coalition that is mainly liberal college-educated women who really are not fond of people to judge. It was a bad strategy, but it was the thing they were pursuing. Well, now it turns out that the rubber has hit the road because if you are a photo op guy, if you are in a photo op position, then the thing that you really can't screw up is the photo op. That is the thing more than anything else you can't screw up. Nobody is going to look into the ins and out of Pete Buttigieg's performance in terms of railroad strikes, which is actually his job, right? No one is actually going to look into that and say, is he doing a good job at that? Because that's complicated stuff. That's policy stuff. What people are going to look into is whether he looks sympathetic when something really intense happens, like you know, a giant mushroom cloud outside of an American town after a train is blown up.

Now, the media have been trying to say, well, you know, Elaine Chow never visited any of these places.

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