Reuters: Say, you know who might be to blame for that Amtrak crash? Donald Trump

When I was a kid - and I'm talking, like, 7 - I thought the president sort of "ran" everything. If something somewhere went right, the president must have done a good job of making it happen. If something went wrong, the president must have screwed up. As you grow older you realize that politicians don't control everything that ever happens, unless you become a liberal in which case you either think they do or you think they should. (The president when I was 7 was Nixon, so this gets complicated for liberals but that's a topic for another day.) So the 7-year-old version of me might have thought the president was to blame for a train crash in Seattle. But something happened to me that stopped me from thinking such idiotic things. I turned 8. I guess my 7-year-old self could have gotten a job writing for Reuters, because they seem to have a hard time separating the "train crashes in Seattle" thing from the "president must be to blame thing."

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Or maybe they're just looking for an excuse to rag on Donald Trump, and predictably citing the nebulous cadre of "critics" to do it:

As investigators sift through the wreckage of this week’s Amtrak train crash in Washington state, critics have begun questioning President Donald Trump’s recent efforts to roll back or delay finalizing U.S. rail safety regulations. Making American railroads safer drew renewed attention after the passenger train derailed on Monday morning while speeding onto a bridge, killing three passengers and sending about 100 people to hospitals. The accident occurred as the U.S. Transportation Department is reviewing a series of rail safety requirements or proposals set under prior administrations. The White House has promised a sweeping effort to eliminate regulations throughout government and cut at least two existing regulations for every new one. Earlier this month, the Transportation Department reversed a decision requiring crude oil rail tank cars to be fitted with an advanced braking system designed to prevent fiery derailments. The requirement to install electronically controlled pneumatic brakes had been included in a package of safety reforms unveiled by the Obama administration in 2015 in response to a series of deadly derailments stemming from the U.S. shale boom.

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The crash in Seattle occurred because the train was traveling at 80 miles per hour through a curve where you're not supposed to go faster than 30. No one in the Trump Administration is proposing a deregulatory move that would allow that. And the train that crashed was not a tank car. It was an Amtrak passenger train, so it wouldn't have been affected by the now-reversed regulation anyway. This is starting to sound like one of those mass shootings that are followed by people screaming for gun control, only to then realize that every proposed gun regulation would have done nothing to stop the shooter. But if Democrats are so concerned about railway safety, perhaps they'd like to stop delaying confirmation proceedings on Ronald Batory, who is President Trump's nominee to take the nation's top railway safety position. Senate Democrats have kept Batory's nomination bottled up for months as part of their broader effort to abuse Senate procedural maneuvers to make it harder for Trump to staff his administration and govern. Anyone who takes their yelping seriously while knowing that is an idiot. As for the Reuters story itself, this is a classic example of a media outlet inventing news. "Critics have begun questioning" deregulation? Really? All the quotes in the story pertain to complaints about railway regulations in general, not anything pertaining specifically to the Seattle crash. But a train crash is a great opportunity for the media to raise the issue on its own while claiming it's only reporting what "critics" say. We still need to get the official conclusion of the investigation, of course, but given what we were told about the speed at which the train was trying to take that curve, there's no question why the crash happened. And it had nothing to do with deregulation, no matter how much the left would like you to believe every bad thing could be prevented if only there were a few more government rules. The train crashed because when you drive a train in an unsafe manner, you're courting disaster. And sometimes you get it.

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