The Kansas City Star is reporting that Jim Yancey, a 25 year DNR employee and head of the Missouri state parks environmental section, has been fired. Yancey was responsible for withholding a set of E. coli test results in around the time frame to E.Coli-Gate.
Yancey told the press a week ago he had already been disciplined by the DNR, but apparently the Governor's office wasn't finished. As a career employee with no major political connections, Yancey was a low hanging fruit. He could be thrown under the bus without much risk of backlash. And he was.
What's striking about Yancey's case isn't that he was fired: it's that Nixon aides and appointees have done the same things and got away with their careers intact. Whether they were lying to the public or concealing health risks, Mark Templeton, Jeff Mazur and Jack Cardetti have all been protected.
Why? Because if Jay Nixon threw them overboard, they'd have no reason to keep protecting Nixon. Nixon is assuming a huge liability by keeping them around, we can only imagine how much bigger the problem would be if he let them go.
It's not like Nixon isn't afraid to break a few bones. To avoid the PR disaster of having Mark Templeton announce job cuts, Nixon needlessly rushed almost 100 DNR employees out onto the streets without exploring alternatives. A hundred jobs, just for a newspaper headline.
Can the Nixon administration really be trusted to clean up Missouri's waters, when it puts politics before EVERYTHING else?
Yancey told the press a week ago he had already been disciplined by the DNR, but apparently the Governor's office wasn't finished. As a career employee with no major political connections, Yancey was a low hanging fruit. He could be thrown under the bus without much risk of backlash. And he was.
What's striking about Yancey's case isn't that he was fired: it's that Nixon aides and appointees have done the same things and got away with their careers intact. Whether they were lying to the public or concealing health risks, Mark Templeton, Jeff Mazur and Jack Cardetti have all been protected.
Why? Because if Jay Nixon threw them overboard, they'd have no reason to keep protecting Nixon. Nixon is assuming a huge liability by keeping them around, we can only imagine how much bigger the problem would be if he let them go.
It's not like Nixon isn't afraid to break a few bones. To avoid the PR disaster of having Mark Templeton announce job cuts, Nixon needlessly rushed almost 100 DNR employees out onto the streets without exploring alternatives. A hundred jobs, just for a newspaper headline.
Can the Nixon administration really be trusted to clean up Missouri's waters, when it puts politics before EVERYTHING else?
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