Under Fire: Gov. Snyder and Mayor Rahm Emanuel
Under fire: Gov. Snyder and Mayor Rahm Emanuel
The Midwest has two politicians who are getting a lot of grief these days: Gov. Rick Snyder and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Snyder is the midst of a growing scandal over lead in the Flint water system. Emanuel is dealing with a controversial shooting by a cop and a general mistrust of the Chicago Police Department.
Esquire magazine blogger Charles Pierce thinks both politicians suck and should quit and spend more time with their families:
It's time for Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, and Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, to decide to spend more time with their respective families. By their misuse of their offices, they have forfeited the right to hold them anymore. They have left us with a Hobson's Choice of which is the worse malfeasance under the color of law: covering up the riddling of a young man by your rogue police force, or covering up the fact that your policies have sentenced hundreds of young people in Flint to the lives of mental and emotional damage and upheaval to which lead poisoning inevitably leads. These are American horror stories, the both of them. It is time for them to end.
If you made me choose, I'd say what Snyder did was worse. He was the one who rammed the "emergency manager" law through the Michigan state legislature. That led to the end of representative government in a number of places, including Flint. That put major decisions into the hands of someone accountable only to the governor. One of those decisions was to flip the water supply for the city from the Detroit water district to the Flint River. This guaranteed that the water for the city would be carried by ancient pipes that leached lead into it. E-mails that finally have been pried loose from Snyder's administration have revealed that the administration was fully aware of what was going on, and blew off the problem. And then, yesterday, in as smarmy and useless a press conference as I've ever seen, Snyder stood with the mayor of Flint and took a "looking forward, not back" approach to his own insensitive bungling that, in a more just world, would have had him ducking tomatoes, and that, in Iraq, would have had him chased from the room under a barrage of footwear.
We first read about this column at Metro Times.
-- Allan Lengel
