Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert appeared on The Late Show on the federal holiday of Presidents’ Day, also known as “the day when we commemorate George Washington and Abraham Lincoln getting half off on a microwave at Sears”, he joked.
He began with the current president’s surprise visit to Kyiv, where Joe Biden met with Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, “looking like your dad meeting your boyfriend, deciding he’s OK even though he wears cargo pants to church”.
Colbert then turned to fallout from the disastrous toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where at least 50 of 150 train cars carrying flammable vinyl chloride crashed. A chemical fireball forced residents to evacuate and induced mass wildlife death, and has left many townspeople concerned for the safety of their homes.
The disaster was not helped by the Trump administration, which repealed a rule in 2018 that required some trains carrying hazardous materials to upgrade their braking systems, arguing that the cost of requiring said brakes was “not economically justified”.
“Give them a chance, now they have found a cheaper alternative – replacing all the dirt in Ohio,” Colbert quipped.
The Obama-era rule likely would not have prevented the derailment in East Palestine because, due to lobbying by Norfolk Southern and other railroad companies, a train is only considered hazardous if it’s going faster than 30mph with at least 70 tank cars loaded with highly flammable liquids. “Seventy tanker cars full of vinyl chloride – a clear hazard. Sixty-nine is totally fine,” Colbert deadpanned.
“I’m going to guess that one tanker car full of vinyl chloride is pretty dangerous,” he added. “You shouldn’t put any hazardous chemicals on a train unless the brakes are working real good.”
Colbert also mocked the Norfolk Southern CEO, Alan Shaw, who said the plume of black smoke from the “controlled burn” of vinyl chloride “told us that there was success”.
“Yes, we all know the famous saying: where there’s smoke, there’s success,” he joked. “I’d say the interview went off the rails, but for Norfolk Southern, that’s on brand,” he added.
And in other news, a new study found that fecal bacteria are “rampant” on New York City sidewalks. “So the next time your toddler throws a tantrum and hurls themselves on the ground, just leave them there and get a new kid,” Colbert quipped.
“However dirty you think New York sidewalks are, they’re worse,” he continued, as the researchers found 31,000 fecal bacteria per sample of pooled rainwater on city sidewalks. “To which the bacteria said: ‘Yeah it’s a little cramped, but that’s the price you pay to live in the greatest sidewalk in the world!’”
