It's pretty easy to pinpoint blame for the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The Republican governor appointed an emergency manager to oversee Flint and strip authority away from the elected officials of the city. The different city managers in 2013 and 2014 signed off on a switch in the water supply from Detroit and Lake Huron to the polluted Flint River. Yes, the city council voted for the switch to save money, but that vote didn't matter since it was up to the city manager who was, as mentioned, appointed by the Republican governor. The results of tests of the water were either mishandled or suppressed by the state's Department of Environmental Quality. That's a department that is under the Republican governor.
So Republicans are to blame. Quite clearly. Quite directly. This ain't a stretch of logic. This ain't bullshit grasping at straws. A Republican appointing people to make decisions for a town is pretty much A+B=C, a straight fuckin' line here.
But not if you're one of the spooge-bucket carriers for the sniveling right-wing in this country. Oh, no, according to them, the blame rests with Democrats for mismanaging Flint for decades, thus leading to the appointment of the city manager, thus leading to lead-fucked kids.
That's not an exaggeration of the position of much of the conservative punditocracy. The fuckin' National Review (motto: "Hey, even we won't hire Bill Kristol") has an editorial titled, helpfully, "Flint Is Not a Republican Scandal." The editorial gleefully points out that Darnell Earley, the emergency manager who was in place when the water supply change took place, is a Democrat, which is true, except that he served at the pleasure of the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, who most recently appointed him the emergency manager of the Detroit public schools, which is going about as well as you might imagine.
By the way, the Michigan Democratic Party called on Snyder to fire Earley because of his fuck-ups on the water. By the way, the emergency manager before Earley, who signed the executive order on switching water, Ed Kurtz? He's a Republican. Oh, and, by the way, the water switch? It had to be signed off on by the state government run, as you know, by Republicans.
Inflamed bunion John Nolte of that shithole of thought, Breitbart, goes even further: "The city of Flint, Michigan, has been imploding since the 1980’s. Now, due to mismanagement by city officials, the water is poisoned with lead. In every way imaginable, the city is an arm-pit. But how is that possible when Utopian-Democrats have run the city unchallenged for years? How is that possible when in 2006, Flint was voted the 10th most liberal city in America?"
Kevin Williamson of National Review says much the same: "Flint, like big brother Detroit down the way, has a long history of political dominance by the Democratic party. Its current mayor is a Democrat; so was her predecessor; the mayor before him, Don Williamson, was a career criminal (he did time for various scams some years back) and a Democrat who resigned under threat of recall."
At FrontPage, another conservative cockknob magazine, another cockknob writes, "Democrats turned Flint into a deadbeat city. A deadbeat city with high crime, high rates of structure fires, lots of potholes and failing services. Flint, Detroit, Newark, Oakland, Chicago and a hundred other failed and failing cities are their handiwork...Flint’s dirty water originated with its dirty Democratic Party overlords. Blaming Republicans won’t clean it up."
You know what's missing from all of these articles about how the poor, deluded people of Flint keep electing Democrats who keep them poor and deluded? The fucking collapse of the fucking auto industry that caused the closure of the GM plants in the 1980s, reducing the jobs in that field there by over 90% as of this year, from 80,000 to around 5000. You want to head back in time to lay blame? You better go a little further back than just the last couple of administrations in the city.
The conservative logic on this is that Flint was asking to get raped by Republicans because Democrats had dressed it so slutty.
The problem is that the governor's office roofied Flint. We know that by the emails, which show, at best, that Snyder's office wanted to close its eyes and pretend the poisoning of a 100,000 people wasn't happening. At worst, it just didn't care. And, frankly, it doesn't matter what party was involved. Someone should be arrested.