Esquire: It's time for Snyder to go

Joining MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Michael Moore, and —ahem — Cher, Esquire lead political blogger Charles P. Pierce has weighed in on the Flint water crisis. Specifically, Pierce has taken aim at Governor Rick Snyder's role in the recent debacle, in which Flint's water supply was poisoned with lead.

In a Jan. 8 story comparing Snyder to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — currently embroiled in a scandal surrounding the murder of Laquan McDonald by a police officer — Pierce deems Snyder the greater of two evils:

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.

Pierce adds:

There is no question that he has squandered the trust of any sensible Michigander that he knows what he's doing, let alone that he has the best interests of all his constituents at heart. It's time for him to go.

Read the full story at Esquire.