When Rick Perlstein, a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, wanted to offer an example of how conservatives have gotten government wrong, he talked about chickens.
These are chickens that are carrying a chemical that is used to make plastic forks and spoons, because the chemical, melamine, is in food fed to the chickens imported from China. That corrupted feed came into the country through the extraordinarily porous screening of the Food and Drug Administration.
Perlstein said that the inability of the FDA to keep feed with this chemical, which also has been detected in pet food that caused the deaths of an untold number of pets this year, from entering the country is an example of how conservatives have crippled government to the point that it cannot keep us safe. “It is one of the ways conservatism is incinerating a pillar of our civilization,” he said.
