I have to say I’m worried about the lack of a flu vaccine this year. I’m one of those people with compromised immune systems who really need to get a shot and who won’t this year because … well, I’ve been trying to figure that out. It seems to me pretty obvious that the country’s response to flu should not be dependent on one company in Britain. The Bush administration, of course, denies it’s responsible. Surprise! But their defense struck me as weak:
Health and Human Services spokesman Bill Pierce pointed out that last year, Congress only appropriated $50 million of $100 million that the administration had asked for to help companies switch to better and more efficient ways of making influenza vaccine, a process that takes months and hundreds of millions of specially raised chicken eggs.
Hmmm. And which party controls Congress? They sure don’t mind spending billions on anything else they can find. There were warnings, we are told. But the administration didn’t heed them. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And doesn’t it also increase your confidence that the Bushies are on top of our response to a terrorist-deployed viral outbreak?
DRUM ON DREZNER: Dan Drezner who is leaning toward Kerry is still worried that Kerry’s record makes him a bad bet for confronting Jihadist terror in the future. Kevin Drum has a response well worth reading. Money quote:
[O]bsessing over Kerry’s entire 30-year public history is probably unproductive. After all, before 9/11 George Bush and his advisors had little concern for terrorism and expressed frequent contempt for things like nation building and democracy promotion. Does that affect how we feel about Bush today?
It shouldn’t, because we accept that 9/11 fundamentally changed his view of the world. We judge Bush by how he’s reacted after 9/11, not by his advisors’ long records before taking office – and I’d argue that we should do the same with Kerry rather than raking over nuclear freeze minutiae and Gulf War votes from over a decade ago. Obviously Kerry’s past illuminates his character to some degree, but a lot changed on 9/11 and I suspect that ancient history is a poor guide to his view of how to react to the post-9/11 world.
Good point. Bush in 2000 was adamantly against nation-building, paid little attention to terrorism as a threat, and wanted to spend less on the military than Gore. Should he be held to account for that today? Not really. So why should Kerry?
The Dish 