Napa Valley Wine Train.

The Napa Valley is a wine growing region on par with the best France has to offer. It is a short drive north of San Francisco and affluent.

That means Napa is filled with wine, liberals and rich people.

It also became a target for John McCain’s assault on pork from the Obama stimulus package.

McCain and fellow Senator John Coburn listed the Napa Wine Train as number 11 on its list of 100 pork projects because $54 million was being used to lift the tracks out of a flood zone.

The Napa Wine Train is actually a dining establishment that operates on an antique train that travels over 25 miles of the Napa Valley. McCain pointed out that one of the meals is $124 Vista Dome four-course lunch with a glass of sparkling wine.

Why is the government spending $54 million to help a private business?

Sounds like pork at its finest, right?

Of course, when tens of billions of dollars was spent to save the private enterprises of Citibank, Bank of America, AIG and Wells Fargo a lot of voices were muted about the propriety of that bailout.

The truth is this $54 million is not only about wine and a rolling restaurant. The tracks, after all, are a public utility and more than a wine restaurant rolls down those rails.

It is all part of a $99.5 million project to protect Napa from floodwaters that as recently as 2005 did $115 million in damage.

As the Napa Valley Register points out, “the project will allow the Corps [Army Corps of Engineers] to build a replacement and elevate the existing rail bridge over the Napa River, and build a new bridge over the planned bypass channel that will divert water away from the Oxbow and Soscol Avenue’s Auto Row in case of a major flood. Streets in the area, as well as underground utilities, will be raised. A flood wall will be built at the Napa Wine Train station.”

In other words, this is not just about a wine train. It is about protecting a city from flooding. It is a sure bet that a lot of private businesses benefited from the federal funds that have poured into New Orleans to protect it from flooding. Why is New Orleans different from Napa?

There is plenty of pork spilled out by the federal government on questionable projects. The $54 million to raise some train tracks in Napa may not be the best spent $54 million from the stimulus, but the stimulus package was an emergency proposal to put people to work. If someone wants to question how the $787 million stimulus is spent, it should probably be on why more was not spent on infrastructure projects like the Napa Wine Train, and why it has taken so long for these projects to begin. Perhaps we can also get an accounting on how the $1 trillion plus spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have made America safer and not just put us further in debt.