James Islander calls Joe Riley a pharaoh
Like so many of you, we watched Lincoln in theaters and thought, “Where have our nation’s great debaters and sharp-tongued idealists gone?” To James Island, apparently. During a Charleston City Council meeting where Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. was pushing to move forward with the controversial I-526 extension project, James Islander Eugene Platt stepped up to the microphone and went all Old Testament on Riley. “Mr. Mayor, you bring to mind the pharaoh of ancient Egypt, that pharaoh who continued to harass God’s chosen people even after he allowed them to leave Egypt and God had opened the Red Sea for them,” said Platt, a commissioner for the James Island Public Service District. “Likewise, even after you decided to cease depleting your treasury with Napoleonic efforts to deny the good people of James Island their own town, you continue to harass us with endless efforts to bisect our neighborhoods with a winding strip of concrete no less deadly than a cobra.” Zing.

By Paul Bowers
Reprinted from Charleston City Paper