California State Senator Carole Migden (D-SF) has been a threat to public safety and to the lives and limbs of innocent people for some time now, but she carried it to a new level of directness Friday. The AP story by Don Thompson is here. Driving east from the Bay Area on always-crowded Interstate 80, she was driving so erratically that a half dozen motorists called 911. This was not multiple calls from one incident. The calls were spread over a 30-mile stretch from Berkeley to Fairfield. At one point she even hit the concrete barrier that divides the traffic in opposite directions.
Finally, on a surface street in Fairfield, Migden's state-owned SUV rear-ended a Honda sedan, pushing it into the van in front of it and sending Ellen Butawan and her 3-year-old daughter to the emergency room. Ms. Butawan's face is black and blue, but apparently neither she nor her daughter was seriously injured. Supposedly, Senator Migden was distracted by a ringing cell phone, but that doesn't explain the preceding 30 miles of reckless driving. Nor does it explain what Bob Jordan, driver of the van, reports happened next.
In a telephone interview Tuesday with the AP, Jordan said two drivers who followed Migden off the interstate began berating her immediately after the accident."One of them said she'd run him off the road. They were pretty upset that she'd been driving so badly," Jordan said.
"She kept saying, 'You can't talk to me like that, I'm a state senator,"' he said. "She was kind of wobbly. She didn't seem alert. She was not acting normally."
So what is it with lefty politicians and driving? First we had Congressman Kennedy, crashing his car on the way to a nonexistent nighttime session of Congress and whisked off by Capitol Police brass before the beat cops could breathalyze him. (WashPost update here.) Then we had New Jersey Governor Jon "obeying the law is for little people" Corzine streaking down the road at reckless speed, knowing the troopers won't stop him because one of them is driving. Is this cluster of incidents just one of those coincidences that happen at random? Or is there some common factor in their mindset that makes them willing to both excuse intentional violence by others and commit reckless offenses themselves?
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