As one of HN's resident leftists, I drew attention to the story early and it got little traction. While the right has indeed begun screaming loudly about it, calling it an attack on white people and so on (Charlie Kirk@TPUSA, Jesse Watters@Fox, Benny Johnson@Newsmax have all made such claims in the last 48 hours), refuting their claims is not the same as saying the incident is not important.

It is, and I think both the Ohio and federal governments have done a poor job of addressing it, notwithstanding the slow-moving nature of the disaster.

It is political because nobody wants to actually help. By making it political, you take it out of your hands. It is someone else's fault, and you shouldn't have to fix it.

Not once in all of the threads on this topic have I seen someone ask "what can I do to help". Mud slinging and politics is easy because you can do it from a keyboard for free.

I mean, given events of the last few years I think things becoming unnecessarily political should be expected.

That being said, they are probably trying to downplay it because it's directly related to the railroad union strike that Biden shut down a few months back. They wanted more time off-- which would mean more workers and less hours.

Really so the implication is there are ~2.75 of East Palestine derailments per day and therefore no biggie? Or, the others are mostly very minor but I want to downplay this so I'll say this happens almost three times a day, big whoop, deal!