Here’s the background: the continuing resolution that’s keeping the government (and that passed last week) included a rider that, as the Competitive Enterprise Institute put it, “codifies existing USDA practices and elements of a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that lower courts should not automatically prohibit the planting of biotech crop varieties, or the harvest and sale of biotech crops already planted, when their commercial approval is revoked for procedural reasons.” As CEI went on to note, this rider (called the Farmer Assurance Provision) is designed to stop nuisance lawsuits filed in order to keep genetically modified organisms out of the market; radical Greenies HATE GMOs, and don’t really concern themselves with the niceties and expectations of normal Western society when it comes to promoting their frankly religiously fanatical worldview.

Which is why the aforementioned religious fanatics are freaking out:

Protesters have descended on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House this week, enraged at a potentially health-hazardous provision …

[snip]

Food safety advocacy groups like Food Democracy Now, which collected more than 250,000 signatures on a petition calling for the president to veto the CR…

Sorry about the way I hacked those quotes, but CBS uncritically swallowed the Greenies’ allegation that this was all done surreptitiously: again, as CEI noted, last year’s farm bill (which never got passed) also addressed this issue, and somewhat more severely from the Left’s point of view. If the Greenies are surprised that the issue got brought up, well, the universe often punishes the unobservant. Or those who cannot extrapolate.

But I digress. Twitchy looks at the usual Useful Celebrities dutifully banging a drum over the eeeeeeevvvvilllls of Frankenfood, which is always nice: but I have to ask myself: the Left wanted a veto? Over this? Putting aside for one moment the question of whether it’s reasonable to be terrified of giant bio-engineered triffids ripping themselves out of the ground in order to doom us all*, I don’t know what’s crazier: that the Greenie Left actually thinks that it’d be a good idea to wreck the credit rating of the United States of America over even the very specter of, say, nitrogen-fixing grains, or that they actually think that Barack Obama would be stupid enough to take the advice and veto the legislation. It is, as they say, a puzzler.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Oh, I know: ask a Greenie that’s all het up over GMOs, and they’ll talk for hours and hours about how the problem is all very subtle and of course they’re not worried about Man Trampling In God’s Domain, ha-hah, and how they just want to make sure about things and they’re being REASONABLE about this only the dirty CORPORATIONS are against them and there are INTERNATIONAL TENDRILS insinuating themselves into the halls of power and they’re all alone here as NIGHT comes and they’re all ALONE…

…and then you look into their eyes, and you think to yourself: Yup. Triffids.