USDA: "A BUNCH OF STOOGES"

This is a delightful phrasing, packing in both meanings of "Stooge" - a) the audience "volunteer" who's secretly working for you, and b) one of the trio of comically incompetent buffoons - and both with perfect accuracy.

The quote comes from Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, who has fought the importation of young Canadian cattle over BSE concerns. His full quote was: "A few years ago, the four big meat companies, they expanded their role in this country. They bought a U.S. company called the United States Department of Agriculture. They are a bunch of stooges. The USDA crawled right into bed with them (the meat companies) and they run our internal policy and our international (beef) policy." Not often you hear a high-ranking official put it so bluntly.

Schweitzer may have been thinking of the specific stoogery of the August 19th (you'll never guess what day of the week that was) recall of 1,856 pounds of potential high-risk bone-in beef that had entered our country improperly from Canada. Even R-CALF was livid, expressing disappointment in the USDA's "failures," and in the fact that "although the processing facility, Green Bay Dressed Beef, voluntarily recalled the bone-in beef at issue, the recall was not initiated until Aug. 19, more than two weeks after this cow was processed." Yeah, that is kinda odd, ain't it?

Earlier that same week, it was revealed that "inspectors cited meatpackers more than 1,000 times over a 17-month period for violating rules concerning the removal of tissue associated with mad cow disease." While apologists try to downplay the "non-compliance" citations as trivial, the reports do indeed document "instances of meatpackers failing to properly remove 'specified risk materials' or SRMs-- brains, spinal cord tissue and other tissues that scientists say harbor the disease." Which means these entered the US food supply. 

And a couple days later, the Stooges admitted - only after a specific inquiry on this from the Associated Press -- that they had done no test other than IHC on at least 9,000 cows. You may remember IHC as the test that falsely cleared a Mad Cow back in November, an error we didn't find out about -- and wouldn't have, if the USDA chief had his way - until June of this year. Now, how exactly did that happen, again?

Funny you should ask. And even funnier that you expect the Stooges to provide an answer. After their lengthy taxpayer-funded investigation into that embarrassing and suspicious snafu, the final answer is... "Gosh, we just dunno!" Duh... Klonk!!! Whoop-whoop-whoop... Why I oughta...

It's hilarious, except that these knuckleheads are in charge of an industry that has literal life-and-death consequences for all of us.