~ we already know that president bush believes that the way to deal with forest fires is to cut down the trees which fuel them; now we learn from him that ‘A [flu] pandemic is a lot like a forest fire…it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it.’ if trees, not fire, are the problem, then people, not flu, are the problem. president bush claims that the only way to prevent avian flu from spreading from human to human would be to eliminate the humans.

‘seriously’, though this latest attempted diversion from the headlines that the vice president’s chief of staff lewis libby has been indicted for committing perjury in an attempt to cover up the administration’s outing of a c.i.a. agent (or just c.i.agent?) in retribution for her spouse’s honest and ultimately correct assessment that the administration’s justification for the war on iraq were fraudulent would bullshit even it it wasn’t being mentioned for said diversion. we weren’t destroyed by sars, by west nile virus, by anthrax, by mad cow disease (unfortunately), by needles in our pepsi or by cyanide in our tylenol; we won’t be destroyed by this year’s doomsday device.

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