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" Prior to my contracting a stomach flu of the rare, but spectacular, Exorcist strain, I was supposed to go down to Murray, Kentucky, on business. As I gradually came out of the haze, I began to hear about an accident that would have lengthened my trip by at least an hour and by about 50 miles. A cargo ship carrying NASA equipment \u2014 including an Atlas rocket \u2014 slammed into the Eggner Ferry Bridge, which spans Kentucky Lake on behalf of U.S. Rte. 68 and state road 80. About 2,800 cars a day use the bridge. In addition, phone service to the surrounding area was disrupted because a fiber-optic cable that ran under the span went down with it, and the impact on the local economy is likely to be severe. It seems that the ship, the Delta Mariner tried to go under the bridge at a section reserved for recreational vehicles only. It also seems that the bridge was not lit the way it was supposed to be lit: WPSD-TV in Paducah reported that KYTC had planned to have electrical work performed on the bridge&amp;#039;s navigation lights today.  Officials in Kentucky now say that the navigation lights should have been sufficient for the ship to notice that it was going under the wrong part of the bridge. But, still, the bridge would have been 80 years old this year. It was scheduled to be replaced anyway, and very preliminary work of a new four-lane bridge over the lake already had begun. You wonder how many patch-and-fill projects there are around the country, how many bridges with balky lighting and obsolete construction. Of all the mysteries of our politics, why this country can&amp;#039;t simply fix itself is one of the most enduring. And the mystery is not why sensible proposals die in Congress. They die for the reasons they always die \u2014 because, in Congress, sensible proposals end up in the hands of nonsenical people. The mystery is why the American people don&amp;#039;t rise up, merely out of raw self-interest, and scream, &amp;quot;Fix the damn bridges. Fix the damn roads. Hell, fix the damn dams.&amp;quot; This shouldn&amp;#039;t be hard to do. Infrastructure spending creates jobs and it keeps you and your car from falling into a lake. Scoreboard! Last April, zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan produced a proposed budget that would have cut infrastructure spending by 37 percent per capita. (Ryan later said that, well, &amp;quot;you can&amp;#039;t really deny&amp;quot; that infrastructure spending creates jobs, but that what small-business owners really want is &amp;quot;certainty&amp;quot; in the tax code. And he&amp;#039;s the smart one.) You may recall that the president took a whack at it last fall, calling for increased infrastructure spending. This plan, of course, didn&amp;#039;t even make it to Thanksgiving. Mitch McConnell \u2014 who, it should be recalled, represents Kentucky and most of the 2,800 people a day who use that bridge to get to work, and all of the people with screwed-up phone service \u2014 maundered: &amp;quot;The truth is, Democrats are more interested in building a campaign message than in rebuilding roads and bridges...And frankly, the American people deserve a lot better than that.&amp;quot; Why should Mitch McConnell ever get another vote from the people who now have a longer commute and worse phone service because a ship plowed into a badly lit, 80-year old bridge? I do not understand this, and I never will. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12524/kentucky-bridge-collapse-6648626/>