It's time for Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, and Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, to decide to spend more time with their respective families. By their misuse of their offices, they have forfeited the right to hold them anymore. They have left us with a Hobson's Choice of which is the worse malfeasance under the color of law: covering up the riddling of a young man by your rogue police force, or covering up the fact that your policies have sentenced hundreds of young people in Flint to the lives of mental and emotional damage and upheaval to which lead poisoning inevitably leads. These are American horror stories, the both of them. It is time for them to end.

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.

The feds are looking into this whole thing, and good for them. Michael Moore wants Snyder arrested. (Cher wants him executed. Cher?) 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.

As for Emanuel, and all schadenfreude aside, his apparent desire to buy off the family of Laquan McDonald in order to keep McDonald's murder from harshing the mellow of his re-election campaign is about as appalling as we've come to expect from a guy whose entire career consists of sucking up to money and alienating everyone else.

Emanuel said last month that Stephen Patton, Chicago's corporation counsel, briefed him "towards the end of March" about what the dashboard-camera video showed and about the proposed $5 million settlement with McDonald's estate. After that briefing, Patton's second-in-command, Thomas Platt, drafted settlement language to keep the dash-cam video hidden for at least several years, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast.

He has no allies left worthy of the name, and most of the people who still support him are not the kind of people who can convince the people of the city of Chicago that Rahm Emanuel is worthy of their trust any more. In their own distinct ways, Snyder and Emanuel are perfect examples of what happens when politicians base their entire public careers on the principle that the people who elect them can be trusted to do only that. Once they elect you, their job is to sit down, shut up, and take what comes. The difference is that Snyder seems a bit more likable than Rahm Emanuel. So is a gaboon viper. That doesn't matter a damn any more.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io