The Golden Age of Bipartisanship

Transcript

The Drug Scandal That’s Finally Hitting The Big Time

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

March 11, 2013 at 1:45PM

(B)ack during the Golden Age Of Bipartisanship, wherein everybody made nicey-nice to each other, and deals were cut that sold out gay people (DOMA), poor people (welfare reform), and all the while the Republicans tried to give the boot to the president with whom they were cutting all the deals, and most of the Democrats, looking to suck up that sweet corporate cash that was sluicing into the party through the DLC floodgates, went along for the ride. (Joe Scarborough, the Machiavelli of the live bait industry, cited this period just the other day as being altogether remarkable. Republicans were working with a president they were trying to impeach! Mirabile dictu!) Now, here’s another masterpiece of bipartisan achievement. (The Supreme Court mucked around with it, too, gutting what remained of the FDA’s power to regulate the compounders in 2001.) They waited until Kessler was gone before passing the bill. In signing the bill, President Bill Clinton attached a presidential signing statement to it that strikes with a cruel irony today.

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Trust them. They’ve got this.

But the principle obtained – make a deal to make a deal, and the devil take the details. Now, almost 50 people are dead because Everyone Agrees that The Market will always be more efficient at doing things like picking up deadly fungal infections than the dead hand of government regulation will. Some day, we are going to have to count up the cost of The Third Way of the 1990’s, and it is not going to be pretty.