Bridge 9340 may have been architecturally flawed from the drafting board and if so, Minnesota's state bridge engineer offered, would lead to the question of "why the bridge stood for 40 years before collapsing." But such a line of reasoning is invisible to the theology of Congress, which holds that in Washington, D.C., all things are possible unless that prepotent, bursarial hand can be obstructed.
Senator Harry Reid, a believer, began the night of the accident, saying that a stubborn president slowed funding to civil construction. Members of Reid's party insinuated that appropriations could have been spent on the Mississippi River bridge only a week or two before, if not for the prospect of a captious White House veto.
From the bosom of federal embonpoint of their own helping, legislators denounce the one man in Washington for whom spending is not constitutional prerogative — as cheap. President Bush could have responded in many ways. What, after his signature, would the bridge have been reinforced by churning c-notes into a special portland cement? He chose practicality: "if rebuilding bridges is that big a priority," then spend it on that, "as opposed to helping individual congressman or senators realize pet projects in their districts." As if it were Washington's responsibility? The state of Minnesota maintained the bridge, and as any other, mostly through its own transportation budget.
Abetting the Democratic charge were newspaper headlines reporting 70,000 bridges in the United States earning a certain black mark from the Federal Highway Administration. Seventy thousand! — until one realizes that even bureaucracies close bridges and roads that are unsafe. And, too, that there are over 500,000 bridges in the country, very few the size of Bridge 9340, almost half of them locally owned; and, if the temptation to blame the president lingers, that in 1992, black marks went to 118,000 bridges.
One benefit to taking "what the good Lord gives you," as a gentle handyman once smiled to me, is a lessening of man's capacity for awesome feats making the perfect into an enemy of the in-any-way sensible. The least we can be thankful for is that the horrible event has not caused hallucinogenic trials of whichever public official can be trussed the most easily, as did the flooding of New Orleans.