Their Fault

Interesting news day. The Dems force an overnight session in the Senate, but the Junta loyalists don't crack. As TPM points out, the Junta's propaganda arm (ie the MSM) bizarrely refuse to call it a 'filibuster.' It's only a filibuster when the Dems do it, right? Apparently, and sadly, so.

But what I found interesting was the way that the Junta gets to have everything be somebody else's fault. Let's take two examples from this morning.

First, the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is a blistering slam dunk case that the Toddler Prince has done everything, as we'd guessed, completely wrong. But wait! It's not his fault!

In identifying the main reasons for Al Qaeda’s resurgence, intelligence
officials and White House aides pointed the finger squarely at a hands-off
approach toward the tribal areas by Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, who last year brokered a cease-fire with tribal leaders in an
effort to drain support for Islamic extremism in the region.

See? Even though: "President Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged Tuesday that the strategy for fighting Osama bin Laden’s leadership of Al Qaeda in Pakistan had failed."

It's that darn Musharraf, who everyone agrees is fightin gto keep control of a wobbling relationship with the extremist US and his Islamist population. Him. It's his fault. It's not six years of Junta strategy, thousands of lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted. It's that Musharraf.

I hope the stenographers got that right, because otherwise it means that there's a clear and unmistakable intelligence document that says the Junta has utterly failed.

And then there's the tainted products coming in from China. You know - the anti-freeze toothpaste, the deadly pet food, all that. The stuff they executed their food minister over.

It's a good thing they did that and grabbed all the headlines, because there's another side to the story. That is, the FDA is failing to protect American consumers. Failing completely. As in, food product imports have doubled since 2003, and the number of FDA inspectors have been cut in that same time period.

I'm not sure there are strong enough words for this.

Check it out:

According to testimony Tuesday before a House subcommittee, they have been able to bring tainted products into this country because the F.D.A. has neither enough resources nor inspectors to stop them. And each year it has become easier: since 2003, the number of inspectors has decreased while imports of food alone have almost doubled.

Recently consumers have had a crash course in the hazards of imported products, especially those from China: pet food and pig and chicken feed contaminated with melamine; counterfeit toothpaste with diethylene glycol; fish contaminated with antibiotics and a suspected cancer-causing agent; the use of carbon monoxide to make decomposed fish look fresh.

This is pure Repub/Junta ideology. Government regulations are bad. Government inspectors are just in the way of commerce. And yet, is there any real constituency in the US for gutting the FDA in the face of tainted imports? Does anyone out there support the sale of decomposed fish?

And yet...

Despite headlines about these imports, the F.D.A. intends to close 7 of its 13 laboratories that test for these problems. Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the subcommittee, said the closings “would likely expose Americans to even more danger from unsafe food, particularly imports.”

And they're not just closing any labs. According to the article, the San Francisco lab has a reputation for knowing their stuff, such that importers do their best to go to other regions to bring in their crap.

So, of course, in the twisted universe of the Junta, the San Francisco lab is targeted for closure.

Once again, the blame goes to the bad foreigners and not the incompetent Junta. Really, it must be such a comfort to believe in their sub-human philosophy; failure is their cornerstone. Success and intelligence are their enemies. They believe that government doesn't work, so they set out to prove it.

The FDA can't protect you, see? There's proof - it didn't protect you. Same with FEMA. Don't look too close and see that the agencies have been gutted of professionals and staffed up with know-nothing political cronies - that's not the point. The point is that you spent tax dollars on the FDA and it didn't protect you, so what's the point?

Needless to say, if you put Repub political operatives in charge of a lemonade stand, it would explode and devastate the community. If you put competent, experienced little girls in charge, it thrives.

By the same token, the war policies have been so completely bungled and wrong-headed that even the best military in the history of the planet couldn't make them work. And now, since the GWOT is a complete failure, we must point the blame at Musharraf.

Or somebody. Give them time and they'll find somebody to blame if they look hard enough - other than in the mirror.