Don’t mind those engineers. They were sitting in class taking calculus and learning the scientific method when people like Nick Coleman were learning how to…

…um…

…well, anyway.

The point being that even though the latest news on the Bridge Collapse investigation – the one being carried out by actual engineers – indicates that the bridge didn’t collapse as a direct result of the failure of the Gas Tax – Nick Coleman still knows better than all those dumb engineers:

Get ready to be gusseted.

Let’s stop right there.

Has Nick Coleman learned nothing from years of having his neologisms thrown back in his face wrapped in ridicule?

I doubt that many Minnesotans heard of gussets before Aug. 1, but since the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge, “gusset” has become a favorite word in the mouths of politicians, particularly those looking to cast suspicion not on their politics or policies, but on inanimate steel objects.

Of course, if the “inanimate steel objects” (and, more importantly, the design work that went into them) actually were the problem – well, that’d be an issue, wouldn’t it?

Gussets are steel plates used to reinforce joists or connect girders. Although a three-year study of the problems of the ailing I-35W bridge did not focus attention on the bridge’s gussets, and although the bridge was still in the Mississippi River, it took only a week after the bridge fell for the Bush administration’s secretary of transportation, Mary Peters, to finger the culprits: Gussets.

A week.

Shocking.

Or course, two days after the collapse, Nick Coleman appeared on cable TV to pin the entire blame on Minnesota Republicans, funding, and the gas tax.

Two days.

She was immediately echoed by a private consulting firm hired by the Pawlenty-Molnau administration within hours of the collapse — without public bid. That firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, was hired for $2 million — coincidentally, the cost of a plan for reinforcing the bridge that was rejected by the Minnesota Department of Transportation months before the collapse.

Since Coleman clearly rejects all of that “empirical method” and “engineering” nonsense in favor of “knowing stuff”, I have to wonder if he wrote that graf without even knowing that it’s complete doubletalk? Two million was the price of a plan. A plan that might have planned to address the causes of the collapse (maybe – and we’ll never know from Coleman’s column), but, given that it came up “months before the collapse”, wouldn’t have actually fixed the problem, even had it addressed the actual cause of the collapse – which we don’t yet know!

The Pawlenty administration has been accusing critics of jumping to conclusions about the cause of the collapse because we argue, whatever the physical causes, that there was a dereliction of a public duty to keep bridges standing and bridge users alive.

And – let’s say it together – Pawlenty is right. “Critics” – mainly politically-motivated hacks like Coleman, Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenburg and Alice Hausman – were blaming Pawlenty before the last girder had fallen.

If you listen to Minnesota’s officials, it’s almost like the bridge never fell. It couldn’t have. After all, they had a great plan for keeping it up.

On paper.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH

You mean, just like the $2 million “plan” to keep the bridge up that Coleman mentioned not ten paragraphs above?

The one that’s distinguished from the “plan” Coleman now ridicules…why?

This is an illustration of the disconnect between no-tax politics and the real world, where gravity is stronger than wishful thinking.

And actual empirical science is stronger than the wishful thinking of a bitter old hack who wants, more than anything, to capitalize on the Bridge tragedy.

This next bit (emphasis added)…:

Pinpointing the physical cause of the collapse will require long forensic investigation. But CYA is Chapter One in the political playbook, so the pols are clinging to their Grassy Knoll Gusset theory.

…makes me wonder if the entire state can take out a restraining order.

Peters, the federal secretary of transportation, repeated her gusset tale Nov. 1, causing one gob-smacked Republican who heard her, Edina’s Rep. Ron Erhardt, to state the obvious:

If gussets failed, he said, “What is that but a lack of maintenance?”

Exactly.

“Exactly” – in the same way that a faulty premise is a matter of bad copy editing.

Numbnuts “Representative” Erhard and “Writer” Coleman:  if the gusset plate was designed wrong, it wouldn’t matter if it was brand-new off of the palette.  It would have been inadequate from the moment it was welded into place. 

That is not maintenance.

That is design.

That is what we get for electing scientific illiterates – or reading them.