On any given news day right now, you can pick up half a dozen pieces on Greenland, Davos, NATO, and of course updates on ongoing conflicts like Ukraine. Yet small towns in Colorado can open up the household tap and set off a Geiger counter — and this is sailing under the radar. Thank God we have Charlie Pierce sounding the alarm on Trump’s toxic veto.
However, as The New York Times points out, the heedless bungling of this crowd reaches down into the small places as well.
John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, flew to eastern Colorado in 1962 to celebrate a pipeline project, already 30 years in the planning, that he promised would bring clean water to farm towns whose groundwater was contaminated with salt and radiation. It was never completed.
Many people in the area still cannot drink from the tap safely. And now the 47th president, Donald J. Trump, has left many wondering if they ever will. Congress unanimously passed a bill last year, sponsored by Representative Lauren Boebert, a conservative Republican closely aligned with Mr. Trump, to help communities in her rural Colorado district pay to finish the pipeline. Then the president, fresh from adding his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, added his own disruptive stamp to another piece of the Kennedy legacy: He killed the pipeline bill.
(I’d like to commend Jack Healy, the author of the NYT piece, on the neat little drive-by elbow he tossed in there, mentioning the president’s hijacking of the Kennedy Center as a comparison to his veto of this JFK water deal. Well played, sir.)
The backstory of the water deal is a combination of the cold-war scramble after fissionable material and some surreal geological circumstance. For example, the water in this area is infused with naturally occurring uranium.
Manzanola, about 40 miles east of Pueblo, has to test its water every few months and mail out letters to its residents warning them about tap water that can make Geiger counters chirp. Some homeowners have put in filtration systems. Others buy bottled water. Some just go ahead and drink from the tap, brushing aside worries about increased risks of cancer. Ms. Adams said the pipeline project, known as Arkansas Valley Conduit, was their best hope for obtaining a steady supply of clean water, piped from a reservoir near Pueblo at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The project would serve 39 small towns and rural areas east of Pueblo across Colorado’s southeastern plains—about 50,000 people in all.
The president is bughouse on Colorado these days because the state’s pliable Democratic governor, Jared Polis, will not pardon Tina Peters, the MAGA ratfcker whom the president gave a federal pardon but who is still doing state time for meddling with the voting machines in Mesa County. So far, to the surprise of many Democrats, Polis has stood firm and Peters is still appearing in jailhouse video dramas.
And that is as simple as it gets. Trump doesn’t care if these rural Coloradans develop cancer or even start to turn blue in the dark. It’s just like Minnesota, where Trump was threatening to withhold foodstamps money if people there didn’t stop protesting over ICE and the death of Renee Good. Trump can’t see the big picture on anything, he’s got too much of an attention deficit. But he can figure out a petty revenge for any and everything that happened just in the past few days.
