Just how wide is the political-intellectual divide I wrote about Wednesday? Well, I had the good (or bad?) fortune to listen in on a conversation in the Oval Office, or at least I imagined I listened in. Here’s what I heard:

Present at the meeting: the President, his chief of staff, the secretary of agriculture, the head of the Food and Drug Administration.

President: I called you guys together because I heard from an old drinking buddy of mine when I was in Texas during August. I swore off drinking, as you all know, but there was a time I could tie one on, and my old buddy Brad, he kind of got me out of some…tough situations. Like the time I mooned a state trooper, heh, heh… Anyway, when I was vacationing at the ranch, Brad stopped in. He’s reformed, like I am, ‘cept he’s a farmer now, says he does something called ‘sustainable farming.’ I never heard that term before, and I didn’t bother to ask him what it meant, since it sounded kind of weird, and Brad always was a deep thinker.

Chief of staff: Mr. President, I think I know where you’re going with this, which is why I invited the agriculture secretary and the head of the FDA here…

President: Let me finish. You know I hate to be interrupted. Anyway, Brad was telling me about these farmers in Texas and Michigan and Pennsylvania and New York raising a ruckus. There’s a bunch of good ol’ boys in Texas all upset about something, I think he said it was NAS, or NAIS. Has to do with putting chips on cattle so the government can keep tabs on them. I didn’t quite get that, cause why would the government want to keep tabs on cattle? I can see putting tags on terrorists, but animals? And he said there’s a guy in Michigan who’s set up some kind of armed perimeter to keep the state department of agriculture out. Says the guy doesn’t want the state injecting stuff into his cattle to do disease testing. And a dairy farmer in Pennsylvania, has the ag and FDA people all over him about sellin’ milk to his neighbors. I don’t even know what those New York dairy farmers are upset about.

I don’t get all this. We give all these farmers lots of money not to grow stuff, and we have companies, good companies that donated to my campaign, guaranteeing to buy these farmers’ milk, and here are a bunch of regular working people getting all worked up about cattle and cows and milk. What the hell is goin on?

Chief of staff: Well Mr. President. I had heard about your meeting with your old friend, so, as I said, I took it upon myself to request that the secretary of agriculture and the director of the FDA come in and explain all this.

Secretary of Agriculture: Mr. President, I did some investigating, and I can understand you wondering about these farmers. I have as much respect as you for our nation’s farmers, but these farmers aren’t your ordinary hard-working farmers. I hate to say it, but these guys seem to be troublemakers. Take that guy in Michigan. Well, he’s keeping the Michigan agriculture people from doing their job to control bovine TB. More than a thousand farmers have gone along and had their cattle tested, but this one farmer says there’s no need for the testing, that if we just fed our cattle some strange mineral concoction, we wouldn’t have a problem. But we still have cattle TB cases in that part of Michigan. If buyers in Japan and France hear about bovine TB, they won’t buy our beef.

And the farmers in Pennsylvania and New York, well, they’re trying to sell milk that isn’t pasteurized. Can you imagine?

President: Wait a minute. Just one minute. Laura’s granddaddy drank unpasteurized milk his whole life, and he lived to be 96. Always said it was ‘cause of the milk, he lived so long.

Chief of staff: Well, Mr. President, I had heard about Laura’s granddad, and thought you might be concerned about the milk situation as well, so the FDA director will try to explain some of these things.

FDA Director: Yes, Mr. President, I know what you’re saying about the raw milk. My grandparents had a farm and they always drank the milk right from the cows. They’d give me some when I visited as well. Said it would get rid of all these terrible allergies I had growing up in the suburbs, and still have. Excuse me… (Sneezes and blows his nose.) But my parents told me that was an old wives tale. Just like some farmers wanted to keep using outhouses even after we got flush toilets. They didn’t know it’s just not civilized. Unpasteurized milk and outhouses, they all breed germs. And we still have some of those people around today—who say we can cure asthma or allergies by drinking unpasteurized milk. To my mind, they’re not much different from the old snake oil salesmen who used to roam through small towns making all kinds of wild promises.

As you know, Mr. President, our job is to protect the American people from the terrible diseases these germs cause. People get typhoid and scarlet fever and E.coli from unpasteurized milk. We don’t want that stuff spreading around, because sick voters are angry voters.

President: Right, we got enough angry voters out there, all upset about this Iraq thing.

FDA director: I couldn’t agree more. We’ve come too far to go back to those terrible times of children getting these awful diseases.

But, you may be interested in knowing, it’s not just kook farmers out there making trouble. We actually had a couple of scientists who had the gall to say in a meeting that we should investigate whether the germ theory is valid. Well, we got them out of FDA before you could say ‘holistic health.”

President: You mean there’s a theory about germs? No wonder we have all these deficits, with scientists sitting around wondering about germ theories.

Germs and terrorists. Maybe we should just put all the germs in Guantanamo. Glad we solved this thing. That reminds me. I have another meeting. Time to solve this Iraq thing.

***

More laughs? I was listening to a CNN report yesterday by the medical reporter, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, about new progress in treating heart disease. (Sorry, but it doesn’t seem to be posted on CNN.) The medical correspondent explained that angioplasty seemed a great substitute for expensive and dangerous heart bypass surgery until scientists found that cleared arteries soon clogged back up. That led to stents to keep the cleared arteries open. But since those are foreign bodies, they would become coated with cholesterol and block the arteries. The latest advance: give patients who have stents a heart-thinning medication. So now, they can die from shaving nicks rather than heart attacks.

***

And in the “What’ll they think of next” category, North Carolina ag officials are upset that people are drinking raw milk labeled as pet food, so they want raw milk dyed charcoal color to make it seem unappetizing. I wonder what’s in that dye, and what it could do to pets, and people. In the meantime, if the ag types could harness some of that creativity to figure out how to help people obtain the foods they want…

***

There’s a not-bad article about raw milk in Florida in the Miami Herald. I love the ag department officials who grow up drinking raw milk, and then become tough-as-nails enforcers of raw-milk bans.