Modern Conservatism: State Socialism in Defense of Mad Cow

Kagro X over at the Great Organge Satan spots one of those things noboby believes when you tell them:

"The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease...

"A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows...

"Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

"The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry."

Kagro X points to Rick Perlstein's comment on this:

...When E. coli conservatives say self-regulation is preferable to government, they're even lying about that. Second, observe the contempt for small business. When a small company want to - voluntarily! - hold its product to a higher standard, the government blocks it, in part because bigger companies have to be protected from the competition, in part because a theoretical threat to the bottom line (false positives) trumps protection against a deadly disease.

There's your conservatism, America: not extremism in defense of liberty. State socialism in defense of Mad Cow.

In the comments chapel hill guy points to this deconstruction of Bu$hie's oddball Memorial Day statement wishing the Chinese would buy more American Beef:

...Bush's push to the Chinese to accept US beef was the latest stab at so-called "cheeseburger diplomacy" to try to get major trading partners like China, Japan and South Korea to remove curbs on US beef imports.

The barriers were erected over fears that US beef is tainted with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the brain-wasting condition commonly known as mad-cow disease...

Now, I hate to alarm 'em over at the Great Orange Satan, because you know they're ever so closer to the center of things, but this story broke back in 2004.

You don't suppose they got the idea idiocy is endemic here for a reason , do you?