I was going to write a satire about the recent discovery of a cow with "mad cow disease" (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, to be exact) in which leading Democrats blame President Bush for it.  Unfortunately, they (Kerry, Dean, Gephardt, Clark and Edwards) really did attack him over it, beating me to the punch line!  What a world.

Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean says the Bush administration missed an opportunity to soften the impact of the country's first mad cow scare and that the American beef industry should receive federal aid to weather the crisis.
The former governor, whose state has a large dairy cow population, said the Bush administration failed to aggressively set up a tracking system that would allow the government to quickly track the origins of the sick cow, quarantine other animals it came in contact with and assure the marketplace the rest of the meat supply is safe.
"What we need in this country is instant traceability," he said.

WHAT CRISIS?  That's what I'd like to know.  A single cow with this disease has been discovered.  "Look, the system is working! It must be a crisis! Throw money at it!"  If a hundred sick animals had been found in different areas, I might agree that perhaps it wasn't detected as quickly as it should have been.  But one single cow? And one that was imported from Canada, at that? 

Dean's comment that the beef industry must immediately recieve government money (that is, yours and mine) to "weather the crisis" is nothing more than another pathetic attempt to pander to an interest group in order to recieve their endorsement.  Is there anyone who actually thinks Dean is genuinely concerned about beef farmers and wants to help them?  No, I meant anyone not in a mental institution, or the Democratic party.  Let's get something straight: if some countries ban beef imports from the US, the role of the Federal government is NOT to make up for the lost income with other peoples' money. It's to put diplomatic pressure on those nations to halt the ban.  That's how it's supposed to work.

As for Dean's "instant traceability", we can't get the Democrats to agree on that for immigrant humans, much less cattle! Which is more important to keep track of, al-Qaeda terrorists planning to blow up buildings full of innocent people or a single sick cow?  Maybe we ought to declare terrorism a disease. Then people like Howard Dean, John Kerry (who called for "a national system to make diseased livestock easier to track and contain"), and Wesley Clark (who said the Bush administration needs to "take proactive steps to improve tracking and testing that should have been taken months ago") will finally get on board with the war against terrorism.

The deal with mad cow disease is that the virus resides in the nervous system of an infected animal -- brain and spine.  These parts, in many other countries, are commonly ground up (you've heard of bone meal?) and used in feed for other cattle, spreading the disease.  However, we don't do that in the US; it's illegal.  Cow brains are eaten as a delicacy in some parts of the world. Most people don't do that here, either.  Spread of disease checked, "crisis" averted. 

Time for a thick juicy steak with President Bush.