Which One's Pink?

In the same country where foodstuff advertisers are able to talk people into buying artificially flavored and colored "fruit" cereals for their children but not into buying muesli for themselves (or their kids), it shouldn't surprise anyone that the U.S. Department of Agriculture would try to get away with something like this. Even as the President's wife is trying to get children to eat healthier food, his Agriculture Secretary (that would be Tom Vilsack, the would-be 2008 presidential candidate whose name got ridicule from Jon Stewart and inattention from everyone else) is planning to purchase seven million pounds of slaughterhouse beef scraps and cutting waste treated with ammonia hydroxide - unofficially called "pink slime" - for school lunches.

The food industry has been in the business of feeding pink slime to unsuspecting American consumers for years. Several fast-food restaurants had been using this meat by-product in its hamburgers, but when noted celebrity chef and noted intelligent foreigner Jamie Oliver demonstrated how this "meat" is processed, Taco Bell, McDonald's, and Burger King all agreed to stop selling food made of pink slime. Why the USDA would allow this stuff to be used in school lunches, especially in the wake of its own suggested menu changes to the school lunch program that would increase the use of whole grains, fruit, and vegetables - these would be the first such changes since 1997 - is baffling.

Because the woman who pushes healthier eating is surnamed Obama, and because the chef who brought pink slime to people's attention is a Brit, it's easy to understand why right-wingers think that being against junk food is like being against America. Harder to understand is why anyone of any political persuasion would allow children to eat this gunk. Can we at least agree that children shouldn't eat as their midday meal a sandwich made out of processed meat normally used in pet food? If Rush Limbaugh doesn't want the government telling him what he should or shouldn't eat, fine. But why should that same government force a substance best described as the Velveeta of beef on our kids?

Mmm, pink slime - you want fries with that?

It's ironic that this "pink slime" is used in pet food, when it isn't even fit for a dog.

Shirley They Can't Be Serious!

They are serious. And don't call her Shirley. That's Ms. Sherrod, dig?

The big storm in Washington this week involves a clip of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod, who is black, giving a speech in which she admitted to giving white farmers in Georgia less of an effort to help save their farms than to black farmers. This is a nasty, vicious, racist comment and is mean in spirit. The Agriculture Department was right to fire such a woman and the NAACP was correct to condemn Ms. Sherrod's cold remarks.

Except for one thing. The tape - discovered by right-wing stooge Andrew Breitbart and broadcast by Fox News - was edited and doctored to make it look like that's all that Ms. Sherrod said. She actually went on to say that dealing with white farmers allowed her to see beyond race and give her all into helping them, and she counts many of the white families she's assisted among her friends. That part didn't make it into Fox's broadcast, and everyone from the Obama administration to the NAACP reacted before Ms. Sherrod had the opportunity to explain the tape and Fox had the opportunity to be revealed as a bunch of lying bastards who put out misleading news reports like soft ice cream.

Fox has been pulling stunts like this since virtually the day President Obama assumed office, trying every trick in the book to discredit and in some cases destroy anyone who champions an environmentalist economy (Van Jones) to people helping the poor and the lower middle class (ACORN) to minority empowerment (Shirley Sherrod), lest they get in the way of thwarting their mean-spirited anti-poor, anti-minority, anti-progressive agenda. The American right enjoys a position of privilege and power after thirty years of supply-side economics, and they're not going to give it up without a fight.

What's disconcerting about this is that the Obama administration (and most Washington Democrats)let Van Jones and ACORN's Bertha Lewis hang out to dry and distanced themselves from them. (Jones, as you recall, unwittingly signed an anti-Bush petition blaming the forty-third President for being behind 9/11; Lewis's ACORN was caught in an Abscam-style sting operation by a conservative blogger posing as a pimp trying to get ACORN money to start a brothel.) White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was visibly embarrassed, as was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Both apologized to Ms, Sherrod, and Vilsack offered her a better job; she's "considering" it.

And she's in a very good position to get a raise for this one.

Having been burned thrice by such dirty tricks, pundits insist that Obama won't be so quick to cave to Fox News anymore. So, this would be a "turning point." Right, this White House has had more turning points than the war in Afghanistan. But if the administration is wise enough to call out Fox and take them on next time something like this happens (and it will, possibly next week), that can only be a good thing.