Saturday Night Live’s classic “Pepsi Syndrome” sketch from 1979 sketch involved a spilled cola starting a nuclear meltdown. In “Washington can’t meet the Cheerios Standard”, Michelle Malkin spots a severe credibility meltdown in DC:

I think it’s time we applied the same advertising standards to Washington’s legislative products that the feds apply to breakfast foods. The Food and Drug Administration rapped General Mills this week for making misleading claims about the benefits of Cheerios. The food manufacturer says the whole-grain O’s are “clinically proven to lower cholesterol.” The FDA demanded packaging changes to ensure truth-in-labeling.

Well, how about the bogus marketing of the fiscal “stimulus?” President Obama and the Democrats promoted the trillion-dollar package as job creation salvation. The White House claims 150,000 jobs have been “created or saved.” But since February, the nation has lost more than 1.3 million jobs. The current 8.9 percent unemployment rate in the wake of stimulus passage is worse than the 8.8 percent unemployment figure Obama’s economists darkly predicted if Congress didn’t immediately adopt their recovery plan. (See Innocent Bystanders.)

The “stimulus” was supposed to provide aid to the country’s neediest areas. It’s not. The Associated Press reported after reviewing 5,500 planned transportation projects that “states are planning to spend 50 percent more per person in areas with the lowest unemployment than in communities with the highest.”

President Obama promised that Americans would be able to track “every dime” of the “stimulus” at one, handy clearinghouse website. They won’t. The Recovery.gov site data won’t be fully available until next spring – halfway through the program.

Washington told us the “stimulus” projects were “shovel-ready” and would provide immediate relief. They’re not. The New York Times notes that the program “has paid out less than 6 percent of the money, largely in the form of social service payments to states.”

Democrat leaders baldly claimed that “There are no earmarks” in the bill. But untold tens of millions of dollars are headed to pet projects such as skateboard parks, tennis and basketball court renovation, the National Zoo, the $11 million Bridge to Microsoft, and Pennsylvania King of Pork Rep. John Murtha’s ghost airport to nowhere.

To be fair, on that last item, the vaunted the Center for Instrumented Critical Infrastructure needs to get its staffers there somehow…