♪♪
-Today, I'd like to celebrate my glorious hometown, Cleveland.
The Ohio of my youth offered a unique tourist draw.
-41 industries discharging directly into the Cuyahoga
a smelly, off-color brew.
Raw sewage. -Chocolate brown.
-Debris. Oil.
-It oozes rather than flows.
-Water so pristine,
this is the name of the city's football team.
An artisanal cocktail of industrial waste and human goo,
the Cuyahoga River suddenly burst into flames,
but the people of Cleveland
took this episode of aquatic combustion in stride,
covering it on page 11-C of the local newspaper.
Why were Clevelanders so blasé about a phenomenon
that usually only happens to rivers in hell?
[ Screaming ]
Maybe because the Cuyahoga had caught on fire before,
12 times before.
-I know that wasn't the best fire.
I remember a '52 fire.
I think that one probably would've won the prize
for the best fire.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Cleveland finally had what every city dreams of -- a brand.
♪♪
-But while Clevelanders
celebrated their sizzling river's newfound stardom,
a radical environmentalist
was plotting to rain on Cleveland's flaming parade.
-Each of us all across this great land has a stake
in maintaining and improving environmental quality,
clean air and clean water.
[ Distorted ] Clean air and clean water.
-Richard M. Nixon,
the founder of a shadowy group of eco-extremists...
-The government's new Environmental Protection Agency
comes into being tomorrow.
-...the EPA.
The implacable Dick Nixon was determined that history
would remember him for just one thing -- clean water.
EPA goons fanned out across the Cuyahoga,
cruelly draining its precious oil and sewage
and replacing them with an infestation
of fish and wildlife.
-The Cuyahoga is now a poster child of clean water.
-Experts say the water has changed.
-As the power-mad EPA imposed its iron will,
the nation was at risk of losing its favorite pastime --
watching water catch fire.
[ Cheering ]
While unhinged aqua activists
claim that flammable drinking water
is somehow uninviting,
some patriots understand
this country's history from sea to burning sea.
-I've been to a lot of the fracking seminars.
If you go back in history
and look at how the Indians traveled,
they traveled to the burning waters.
-♪ Just around the river bend ♪
-Americans need to support a new direction for the EPA
with uniquely qualified leaders.
-Pruitt is a known climate-change denier.
-...has repeatedly sued the EPA
to roll back environmental regulations.
-Andrew Wheeler, former coal lobbyist,
is now the acting head of the EPA.
-Luckily, the EPA no longer has a blatant clean-water bias.
This is the administration we need
to make America conflagrate again.
-The Trump administration
is set to relax offshore drilling rules.
-...rolling back regulations that were put in place
after the explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon,
the worst offshore oil disaster in U.S. history.
-An inferno on the water.
-Thanks to the wonders of modern water contamination,
Americans no longer have to go all the way down to the river
to find polluted water.
-Imagine turning on your kitchen faucet
and the water pouring out catches fire.
-We can enjoy it in the comfort of our own homes
as we huddle around the warmth of our kitchen sinks.
-Wow.
-Our new, improved EPA understands
that pollution isn't bad.
It's merely a sign that American industry
is firing on all cylinders.
-Fire, fire, fire, fire!