Swine epidemic

Slow death by pigs didn’t just begin, and it didn’t originate in Mexico either. We’ve been under assault by the porkermeisters for years now including the first 100 days of the Obama Administration. But unfortunately we continue to be blocked by his chief hog-swill salesman, Timotheus Geithner, now appropriately de-pantsed by the New York Times for being a charter member of the massively bloated, decades-long Wall Street hamfest.

Geither was merrily exposed Sunday as the worst sort of schmoozie buddy-boy of all the banker types he was supposed to be regulating as the top Fed officer for the New York region. Instead of maintaining a prudent distance, he regularly enjoyed a bountiful lunch with them while vigorouly defending their interests in all his high-paying jobs, for which he forgot to pay his taxes.

The narrative is nauseatingly reminiscent of the Rita Lavelle scandal of the early 1980s when this Reagan appointee at the Environmental Protection Agency was caught supping and dining regularly with every industry lobbyist whose business she was supposed to be overseeing. I had the time of my life covering the hilarious spectacle of Lavelle being confronted with the inconvenient facts of her busy datebook in a congressional hearing in 1982. She was forced out and much later did time for perjury in a case involving an attempt to swinishly swindle Superfund money—dubbed “Sewergate.”

Also appropriate is the de-skirting of the opportunistic Susan Collins of Maine who led the charge against wasteful ‘pork’ spending in the Obama stimulus package by excising nearly $1 billion in preparedness money for. . . a flu outbreak! Collins, wielding the carving tools like she was deboning a shoat carcass, played to the Republican rafters as a fiscal tough-girl to solidify her base among frugal Mainers. These are the Republican ‘moderates’ we should get all weepy over as they slowly fade and dissolve into nothingness throughout the Northeast.

So it’s perfectly hilarious that Arlen Specter should choose this moment to jettison the party of Greedy Old Reprobates especially since Specter just shoehorned a shitpotful of new cash into medical research as the price of his vote for the February stimulus package.

I wonder if the governor of Texas is going to refuse swine flu meds for the residents of his state in a noble defense of his newly secessionist principles. Hey, this might be a good moment to build the wall around the place and start making Texans apply for visas to the upper 49 given their proximity to all those disease-afflicted border towns.