Does the left ever stop? There's a blame-game going on now as to who is responsible for the depleted national stockpile of medical equipment, something the Obama administration had failed to replenish.

How's this for some space-grade lunacy? Here's the Daily Caller:

An April 3 article from ProPublica claims that “congressional Republicans elected on the Tea Party wave forced the White House to accept sweeping cuts to federal spending.” It avoids including multiple reports that disprove the claim that congressional Republicans were to blame for the national stockpile shortage.

ProPublica’s article does admit that the Obama-Biden administration actually proposed cutting funds to the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) – after claiming that the Tea Party was to blame.

“Under sequestration, the CDC, which managed the stockpile at the time, faced a 5% budget cut. In its 2013 budget submission, HHS [Department of Health & Human Services], decreased its stockpile funding request from the previous year, asking for $486 million, a cut of nearly $48 million,” ProPublica admitted. “‘The SNS is a key resource in maintaining public health preparedness and response,’ the administration said. ‘However, the current fiscal climate necessitates scaling back.'”

In fact, the Obama administration also proposed cuts to the SNS in 2011, 2014 and 2015, according to CDC data reviewed by the Daily Caller.

So apparently, the left is still seething about the Tea Party and blaming it for President Obama's repeated failures to replenish medical stockpiles. 

Which is nonsense, given that the Tea Party never ruled anything and even its allies on Congress didn't make the decisions, President Obama did.

With no knowledge of a coming pandemic, he had plenty of money to work with but chose to prioritize its use on other things. That may or may not have been a good idea -- given his greenie crony schemes such as Solyndra, most Americans are going to stay it was a bad one. But to blame the Tea Party, which called for fiscal discipline, is absolutely ridiculous. The Tea Party likely would have asked that the natural preparations for disaster for government be made and the greenie clown shows be scrapped.

Not in the mind of ProPublica, which views any call to cut budgets as a call to cut vital services.

What seems to have happened is an old blue Democrat game, in fact -- cut the important things when small margins are asked for in cuts, particularly the ones the public can see - teachers, police officers, nurses -- and leave the fat bureaucrats, administrators and diversity officers in place. They also cut the long term planning things, such as the national stockpile, in favor of short term marquee things that failed, such as greenie highways and solar energy. We also saw this with Michael Bloomberg's focus on stealing salt shakers off people's tables when New York needed to be focused on preparations for Hurricane Sandy. Today-ism, combined with visible cuts, have long been a staple of Democrats' game of keeping government as big and bloated as possible.

Now they're blaming the Tea Party for the unreplenished stockpile, something they should have been doing instead of celebrating crony green schemes. This is going to come up again and again as the left wheels out the huge spending with this current stimulus program, and then seeks to smear anyone trying to cut the spending in the wake of it.

Oh, spare us.

Image credit: AgnosticPreacherKid, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0