All aboard for Victorville

San Francisco will have the federal funds to build high-speed rail to Anaheim. (Doubtless the Bible Belters are already shrieking about hordes of “sodomites” descending upon Disneyland and corrupting its spiritual purity.) Las Vegans and Southern Californians, meanwhile, will have to content themselves with, in lieu of a rail corridor — a political pissing match. In this corner, Hapless Harry Reid; in the other, Midnight Jim Gibbons.

Each is blaming the other for Nevada‘s failure to get stimulus money for high-speed rail and — guess what? — they’re both right. The mag-lev route in question was doubly doomed. Gibbons is rarely seen in the governor’s office and his notorious indolence has infected what remains of his administration. Not only was he slow and stingy when it came to allocating the stimulus bucks the Silver State had already received, seems he misplaced the postage stamps or something when it came to asking for train money.

But it’s completely disingenuous for Reid to try and dump all the blame on Midnight Jim. After all, who was it who made a big deal of pulling his support from the mag-lev project, saying it had made insufficient progress? Hapless Harry. By a series of remarkable coincidences, Reid prominently threw his support to Sig “The Fixer” Rogich‘s Choo-Choo to Nowhere (aka Victorville). Ol’ Sig just happened to have recently endorsed Harry and also just so happened to be lining up big names from Big Gaming to do the same. (Reid says, Don’t you fret, chilluns; if ‘n when Desert Xpress is extended from Victorville to Palmdale, everything will be hunky-dory.)

To bring matters full circle, while Sig is currently carrying water for Reid, he’s also largely responsible for lumbering the state with Gibbons. So maybe we should just put this whole mess on Rogich and call it a day. We hear the weather’s nice in Victorville this time of year, Sig. Maybe you could do Nevada a favor and move there. If you’re super-duper lucky, someday you’ll only be an 84-minute train ride away.