Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)

First it was Chris Matthews. Then Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) and Rep. Mike McMahon (D-NY). And now we find Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) joining the ranks of those who just can’t wait to tell us what a bunch of pussies we are for not having trekked ten miles uphill both ways in the snow to get to and from work this week, just like he used to way back when.

In a speech on the Senate floor — yes, he said this on the Senate floor — Durbin opined, “I am convinced that infants born in Washington, D.C., are taken from the arms of their loving mothers right when they are born into a room where someone shows a film of a snowstorm with shrieking and screaming so that those children come to believe snow is a mortal enemy, like a nuclear attack, because I have seen, for over 40 years here, people in this town go into a full-scale panic at the thought of a snowfall. We joke about it. Those of us from parts of the country that get snow and know how to live with it cannot get over how crazy the reaction is many times.”

Thankfully, Sen. Durbin somewhat came to his senses. “But in fairness, this has been a heck of a snowstorm … You had every right to be concerned. Some of the other [storms], maybe not, but this one was the real deal,” he said.

Are we being a little thin-skinned about this? Yeah, possibly. But that this many national figures are piling on to tell us how badly we dealt with a storm of historic proportions is getting mighty old. The region isn’t equipped to handle storms of this size, nor should our budgets assume that every winter will include back-to-back winter wallopings that dump 30 inches of snow on the ground. (Unless, of course, Congress would be willing to include those millions into our annual appropriation.)

Are there things that could have been done better? We’ll find out in due time. But second-guessing or name-calling won’t change the fact that every county, every city, every agency and every government in the region — including the feds — decided that the storms were serious enough to merit shutting down or severely limiting service. Could we have soldiered on? Probably. But imagine the outcry from people like Sen. Durbin if one of his staffers had been forced to walk to work from Alexandria or, worse yet, had taken Metro in during conditions that even the transit agency admitted it wasn’t ready to deal with.

So give it a rest. We don’t imagine the California congressional delegation would tell you what a bunch of ninnies you are if an earthquake hit Chicago, so there’s little need to tell us how much better your state is at handling snow removal.

There. We’re in our Zen place now.