Flint Michigan’s water problem is not a Republican scandal. But that doesn’t stop the opportunistic smear artists from claiming otherwise.

What we learned from Hurricane Katrina: No matter what happens, it’s never the governor’s fault. What we’ve learned from the contaminated drinking water in Flint, Mich.: It’s always the governor’s fault.

Flint no longer wanted to get their water from the usual place, switched, and the new source is all kinds of contaminated.

Snyder wasn’t governor when that change started and had no control over the decision, yet the Democrats are calling it a Republican scandal. Why?…

-the Democratic governance in a Democratic city obliterate the cities finances
-the Democratic emergency manager signs off on a consensus plan to use a temporary water source,
-the municipal authorities in this Democratic city fail to do their job of treating and monitoring the drinking water,
-a state agency whose workers work under the SEIU (liberal union) didn’t do their job overseeing local authorities,
-and Barack Obama’s EPA failed to do it’s job

…but it’s Republicans fault.

Dude…

It’s legit to ask if the truth can survive this “scandal”

This is the kind of complex government scandal where no one looks good. Incompetent local Democrats managed their city into near-bankruptcy. Their Democratic friends in next-door Detroit sucked them dry with water-rate hikes. The decision to change water sources was defensible enough, but then Republican state officials and Democratic federal bureaucrats both failed in their statutory duties to protect the public from its own water supply. RELATED: Political Poison: How Many Flints Before We Learn Our Lesson? But the Left is unmatched in its ability to capitalize on a crisis to call for more money and more control. Writing in the Washington Post, Katrina vanden Heuvel says the real lesson is that government just wasn’t big enough, declaring the crisis “a direct consequence of decades of policies based on the premise that government spending is always a problem and never a solution.” Yet Flint’s extraordinary government spending was the reason for its near-bankruptcy. A more than billion-dollar unfunded pension liability is not a sign of municipal frugality.

The link at the top is worth reading in full, but in closing:

Governor Snyder, of course, does bear some responsibility here and, to his credit, has acknowledged as much. No, no reasonable person expects the governor to show up in Flint with a white glove and personally eyeball what the local water-treatment plant is up to, but the people he appointed did an insufficient job. It is ironic, given the tenor of the denunciations, that Governor Snyder is as guilty of excessive bipartisanship as of any other offense: In his desire to keep Flint under the watch of an emergency manager with whom the locals were comfortable — a Democrat — he may have overlooked better candidates with more thoroughgoing approaches to reform. If you’ve followed Flint’s history of nearly criminal misgovernance, you know that what was needed was more iron fist and less velvet glove.

So while those who fault Governor Snyder are not entirely wrong, what is deeply dishonest is the story put forward by such people as the filmmaker Michael Moore, who enjoys pretending to be from gritty, blue-collar Flint (he actually hails from an affluent suburb nearby), that this is, somehow, the result of the Republican approach to government or conservative governing ideas. That is absurd. Flint is a mess made by Democrats, made worse by the Democrats in Detroit, and ignored by the Democrats in the White House. The worst that can be said of the Republican on the scene is that he failed to save the local Democrats from the worst effects of their own excesses. But that is the Democrats’ approach to calculating the chain of responsibility: Go up the ladder or down, as needed, until a Republican is located, or a private firm, in which case capitalism can be blamed. The Democratic monopolies in Flint, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Newark? Somehow, somewhere, there’s a Republican responsible for that, even if he has to be brought in on an overnight flight from Oklahoma. Flint is nothing more than a miniature Detroit.

And Detroit is what Democrats do.