Just an observation on the changing attitudes of a certain New York Times columnist. Here she is October 21, 2001:
John McCain called to try to talk me down. I put aside “Scourge,” the book I was reading about smallpox — “It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life” — and listened.
“There’s nothing wrong with being afraid,” the senator said in that soft, reassuring voice. “Every time I heard the guard’s key chain rattle when he came to my cell at an odd hour, I felt fear, but it didn’t incapacitate me.”
Easy for him to say. He’s a national hero who was tortured in Vietnam. I’m a spoiled yuppie who desperately wants to go back to a time before we’d heard of microns and milling, aerosolization and clumps in the alveoli… I ran into my colleague Judy Miller, a bioterrorism expert, and asked if we should be worried about smallpox, camel pox and mouse pox.
“We should be worried for the next few years,” she said briskly, “and then we’ll be fine.”
The next few years?
And here she is recently, after the despised Bush administration has wacked al Qaeda in Afghanistan and disarmed Saddam of his infrastructure of deadly weapons:
[W]e know now that our first pre-emptive war was launched basically because Iraq had … a vial of Botox? Just about the scariest thing the weapons hunter David Kay could come up with was a vial of live botulinum, hidden in the home of an Iraqi biological weapons scientist. This has very dire implications for Beverly Hills and the East Side of Manhattan, areas awash in vials of Botox, the botulinum toxin that can either be turned into a deadly biological weapon or a pricey wrinkle smoother.
She sure has recovered, hasn’t she? You won’t find a better example of 9/11 amnesia than Ms Dowd, a self-described “spoiled yuppie who desperately wants to go back to a time before we’d heard of microns and milling, aerosolization and clumps in the alveoli.” Didn’t take her long, did it?
The Dish 