Biden’s Speciality: Blame, Excuses And Snippy Retorts
Last Friday I saw a young woman in Wegmans kneeling in the mostly empty baby formula aisle. She had her cellphone pressed to her ear while she picked up the few remaining cans on the shelf and read the ingredients to whomever was on the other end of the line.
It was pitiful.
Just this week, on social media, I saw several desperate mothers whose babies have severe allergies begging strangers to help them find their rare brands of formula.
“If you find it, text me and I’ll Venmo the money,” one mom pleaded.
In Memphis two children have been hospitalized with dehydration due to the formula shortage.
Yet Thursday in Washington, the House voted to give $28 million to the FDA, the very federal agency that created the baby formula mess.
Was it a lack of loot that caused the shortages? Of course not, but throwing money around is how the House shows its concern.
Instead of showering the agency with money, Congress should haul in the director, place him under oath and ask why he didn’t see these shortages coming and act to prevent the crisis.
Look, it’s the job of the FDA to ensure that baby formula products are pure and free from contaminants. When four babies who consumed Abbott formula took sick in February and two of those infants died, the FDA was right to move in, close the manufacturer down and conduct a thorough inspection.
Abbott immediately launched a recall of formula that was already on the market.
The formula maker insists that no link between the facility in Sturgis, Michigan and the sick children was ever found. Still, the FDA reportedly discovered sanitation problems and closed the plant.
Again, that’s the agency’s job, to protect the public.
But on Day One of the shutdown in mid-February these FDA stumpheads should have known that their actions would trigger major shortages. Abbott produces almost half of all baby formula made in America. Making matters worse, supply chain problems were already disrupting the distribution of baby formula. Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported about the problems in January.
Yet no one in the Biden administration noticed until three months later when the outcry from panicked mothers reached an impossible-to-ignore cacophony.
It shouldn’t take moms crawling around supermarket aisles and dabbling in the baby formula black market for the Biden Administration to realize they’ve created yet another avoidable crisis.
But that’s what it took to grab the president’s attention.
In fact, when asked by a reporter why he didn’t tackle the baby formula shortage before last week our C-student president snapped “If we’d been better mind readers I guess we could’ve.”
Sorry, Joe, you didn’t need to be a mind reader to realize that when you shut down a company that produces half of all American baby formula shortages will follow. That simply takes common sense.
The “mind reader” response was a typical snippy retort from this thin-skinned president who specializes in shifting blame and pointing fingers. Shoot, it’s a wonder Biden didn’t try to blame the baby formula shortage on Putin.
Biden has a history of pretending he’s a victim of unforeseen circumstances.
When last August’s withdrawal from Afghanistan turned into a deadly catastrophe, Biden claimed that no one could have predicted Kabul would fall just days after the Americans left. Actually lots of experts predicted a rapid collapse of the capital.
When inflation grabbed America by the throat this winter, Biden’s mouthpiece, Jen Psaki, took the same approach: No one predicted lasting inflation, she declared. Seriously? Lots of economists warned that Biden’s wild spending would lead to inflation.
Biden likes to pretend that astronomical gas prices are the fault of Putin. The president conveniently forgets that prices began ticking up as soon as he took office and shut down the Keystone Pipeline.
Now this.
Allowing Abbott to reopen its plant in two weeks will not ease immediate problems. It could be two months before the new product hits the market. Invoking the Defense Production Act, as Biden did this week, will do little but allow infant formula manufacturers to get first dibs on ingredients. It won’t mean that shuttered oil refineries will be churning out baby formula next month.
Flying planes to Europe to bring back European formula is symbolic. Yet the FDA could have lifted regulations that kept the overseas products out of the U.S. back in February to keep the shortage from occurring.
If anyone in the Biden administration had been paying attention, that is.
