You know, I like Vennochi, but this is a silly argument:
Springing thousands of drug dealers from prison because of tainted evidence at a poorly-run state lab is bad enough.
But now, a lack of oversight by the same Massachusetts agency responsible for the drug lab may have also contributed to an outbreak of fungal meningitis that killed at least a dozen people around the country.
And where is Governor Deval Patrick on this?
When he’s not prepping for Sunday talk shows, he’s blaming “a rogue chemist” for 10 years of tainted evidence. When he’s not traveling, he’s accusing the Massachusetts pharmacy linked to the deadly meningitis outbreak of “misleading regulators and operating outside its license.”
Does anyone really think that crime lab supervision reaches the governor’s desk — except in cases of crisis like this one?
Does anyone think that pharma regulation gets to the governor’s desk — except in cases of crisis like this one? And since these drugs are shipped around the country, aren’t they/shouldn’t they be regulated by the feds as well?
The buck stops at the top, that is true. Patrick’s got work to do at home to rectify these situations. That he should have forseen these things, that tighter management from him personally would have prevented them, or that they’re somehow a predictable result of his out-of-state work for Obama, is a very very tenuous argument.
Bottom line is the same: Gov’s got to make it right — with the help of the legislature.
Discuss
14 Comments . Leave a comment below.…on the Milford Patch web site. In preparation for the chat, the editors asked if anyone had a question for the governor. Some right-wing nutjob said he would ask this: if Gov Patrick were to seek the presidency, would his opposition be right to use the Dookhan case as his Willie Horton moment?
Since Dookhan was actually hired under the Romney administration, I asked if Obama should now be using that as Romney’s Willie Horton moment. The responses were predictably hilarious, with multiple changes of the subject, various straw-man arguments and a few red herrings…
you have all the fun.
On the same thread, someone else posted that he would ask this:
That prompted another wingnut to suggest that we should have a poll to see how many think he should stay and how many think he should go. When I pointed out that we already had just such a poll in November of 2010, I was judged to be the winner of the thread!
and initially trained her. Were these competent administrators/supervisors who couldn’t be expected to know that Dookhan was going to fabricate results, which is certainly plausible, or was there a political appointee involved who perhaps shouldn’t have been in a supervisory role, which would not reflect well on how Governor Romney was running the state. I would guess it’s the former, but it would be useful to know for sure.
I certainly wouldn’t expect an incoming governor to be trying to clean house at the level of someone doing lab tests.
I’m also wondering, as are many others, why no one noticed she was performing way more tests than could reasonably be possible to conduct accurately. Here I’d agree that this is not likely something that a governor personally would be overseeing, or even someone reporting directly to the governor. This is less a “which governor is at fault” question than “how the hell could this happen at a state agency and how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
It was noticed:
Doesn’t say who the top official was.
How did that happen? Why was there a culture where workers’ concerns were ignored? And yes, who was that “top official?”
I’ve also been wondering whether workers were measured on raw case numbers without any attention to quality. I’ll need to read up more on this, thanks.
It smells of corruption to me. There have been rumors, repeated in the press, of frequent phone conversations with prosecutors. There are these suggestions and hints that colleagues tried to raise concerns and were ignored or rebuffed. I, frankly, can’t believe that her misconduct could have gone unnoticed by officials for so long. I find it much more likely that some one or some group worked very hard to not notice for a long long time. I wonder why.
It smells, to me, of some sort of quid-pro-quo between high-level government officials and Ms. Dookhan. I wonder who corrupted whom. Did somebody know about her resume inflation, and keep it quiet in exchange for a string of positive (and fraudulent) lab results? Did she use her knowledge of how many bogus results had already resulted in convictions to pressure officials to keep the scandal quiet?
How widespread WAS her misconduct? Was she the only one?
This case raises FAR MORE questions than answers.
The whole point of regulation is to make sure that things like the state labs fiasco or the mass killing of patients don’t happen.
The Governor is responsible for putting people into place who will regulate and supervise effectively. It’s the Governor’s responsibility to make sure the people he appoints do their jobs.
Since Ms. Dookhan was appointed by Mitt Romney, Ms. Vennochi’s criticism should be leveled at him, as opposed to Deval Patrick.
. . . who famously said “I was out of the loop” when questioned about Iran-Contra. I’m amazed at how quickly people adopt Bush’s rationale at the first sign of trouble. Supposedly this is a progressive blog, but any concern for the hundreds of people who were wrongly convicted as a result of lax oversight of a state agency seems to missing. Instead, all the concern seems to be for the office holders, how to deflect criticism. And I have to say that somervilletom’s attempt here is about the most pathetic I have ever seen.
You don’t know what people are thinking here, and it’s wrong to think that people aren’t thinking of the wrongly convicted. I was responding to Vennochi’s column, which I think is also a misdirection.
As you pointed out in your post, if Dookhan had been letting people off easily, it would have gone nuclear. But honestly, the story of false convictions of the innocent — and the setting free of the guilty — is pretty damn toxic too. We acknowledge that, as I did in the original post.
I would suggest you not imagine yourself to be morally superior to everyone else here. Self-righteousness isn’t appealing.
I mean, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or whether or not you agree with this column, what animates and drives her? All I have seen for the last few years is eternal peevishness: I’m Joan Vennochi and I’m irritated–with all of you–all the time. There’s no sense of passion about any fundamental arguments or issues–why is she even bothering to write?
that when there’s a choice between whether to be peevish and grouchy vs. fair-minded and surgical, she tends too often towards the former.
And sometimes that’s bracing and necessary, a breath of fresh air. Sometimes not.
It’s human nature.
But who we pick – that’s a clue to what nature of human we are.
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