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Rick Snyder is butt deep in water woes.
First, the right-wing Michigan governor did a belly flop into the deep waters of autocracy when he literally suspended democracy in the city of Flint. By appointing an “emergency manager” to usurp the authority of local officials, he drowned the people’s self-governing rights.
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Then his tyrannical manager created a riptide of local anger that sucked Snyder into a sea of global condemnation – the penny pincher tried to slice some two-million bucks from the city’s budget by switching the source of the people’s drinking water to the contaminated Flint River.
But – oops! – the “cheap” river water ended up leaching lead into the people’s drinking water from the city’s aging pipelines, and thousands of children now face the possibility of irreversible brain damage. Then, even as Snyder and team were assuring local families that Flint’s water was still safe, he was smashed by a wave of horrible hypocrisy from his own budget agency – for a year, budget employees in the Flint office had been getting free bottled water to protect them from the poisoned water everyone else was drinking.
And now, adding to Snyder’s water woes, here comes the Flood. Todd Flood, that is, a prominent Michigan lawyer and Republican partisan. Attorney General Bill Schuette, himself a Snyder crony, appointed Flood as a special prosecutor to investigate whether anyone in state government – including the governor – broke any laws in this disgraceful poisoning of the people. Flood, who has poured more than $13,000 into the election campaigns of Snyder and Schuette, promises to be “impartial.”
Yeah, right. These people aren’t merely contemptible, self-serving cynics – they’re creeps who should have to swallow a thousand buckets each of the bad water they forced on all of Flint’s men, women, and children.
“Rick Snyder Donor Picked To Lead Investigation Of Flint Water Crisis,” www.thinkprogress.org, January 25, 2016.