McCain says pork-barrel spending caused the 35W bridge collapse

“The bridge in Minneapolis didn’t collapse because there wasn’t enough money. The bridge in Minneapolis collapsed because so much money was spent on wasteful, unnecessary pork-barrel projects…. I think there is a long, long list of earmarks which went to unnecessary and unwanted projects that I think should have gone to the bridge in Minnesota. I don’t know whether it would have gone or not, but if you’re spending $223 million on a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it. …”

–John McCain in Allentown, Pennsylvania on Wednesday, via AP.

Really? So even though the state ignored a consultant’s recommendation that the bridge needed a couple of million dollars’ worth of structural reinforcement, and even though Pawlenty/Molnau’s MnDOT  had a track record of leaving available federal transportation dollars on the table, a few simple reforms to Congressional earmarking would have caused the requisite dollars to flow to Minnesota to solve a problem whose existence the Minnesota Department of Transportation denied in the first place?

As Libby Quaid of AP demonstrates, this is pretty much what McCain does believe. Confronted later in the day with a health care earmark that has proven beneficial, a flustered McCain prated for a bit about the Mafia before concluding, “Look, if we reform the process, then the money will take care of itself. It’s a corrupt process.”

So there’s McCain’s good-government plan in a nutshell: anti-pork, pro-magic.