One Flu Over The Cuckoo's Nest

It is not Bush-bashing to consider the ramifications of President Bush’s remarks earlier this week that he is considering using the military to enforce quarantines in the event an avian flu breaks out in the United States. All of those escaped-virus/bacteria-from-space flicks could play out as news on CNN: the Army ringing a metropolitan area, tanks firing shells into speeding SUV’s, a rocket vaporizing a traffic helicopter that strays out of the quarantined airspace, families caught in razor wire or cut down by automatic weapons fire while trying to slip through the cordon to safety even though they are already doomed by exposure to the deadly virus. Meanwhile, chemical-dusting aircraft crisscross the skies to kill every insect and bird within the quarantine and beyond.

Perhaps this is an alarmist vision, silly and naïve, an overreaction to the kind of media hysteria that tabloids have turned mundane. Maybe not. What makes the President’s remarks so interesting, however, is the swiftness with which he has absorbed the public lashing from his Katrina leadership failure and transformed it into his “We will do better” policy.

Say what you will about the men who surround him, but Bush is frighteningly sincere about his duty to the American people when it comes to life and death. Regardless the wisdom of his objectives and strategies, when caught flat-footed he treats the event as if he'd dozed off on his God-given guard duty. God has shined his flashlight into his eyes and all around him is disarray. He's stunned at first, not quite free of the fog of sleep, but he realizes he has fucked up big time. As his wits return, and the burn of guilt sears his heart [yes, I mean that], he vows “never again” and applies himself, or perhaps overcompensates, with a vengeance.

Perhaps he really did need to visit New Orleans several times a week after all of the bad press to micromanage efforts in order to convince everyone there that his Administration was really there finally and that he’d make sure they were taken care of, and could they now please shut up. He was all over Hurricane Rita after it passed over the Keys, so he was able to show right away that it was Michael Brown’s fault that New Orleans turned out so badly.

By now it is well-documented that after 9/11 and quick fall of the Taliban government, GWB jumped the gun on invading Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam had bragged that he had the weapons, even if he denied having them now, and waiting any longer for additional intelligence was just playing into the hands of a known liar. The rubble at Ground Zero was proof enough that waiting was a fool’s game.

“The best way to deal with a pandemic is to isolate it and keep it isolated in the region in which it begins,” President Bush explained during the news conference.

I’m much less prone toward praying than I used to be, but I’m praying for a mild flu season this year. These days one never knows the weight of an ounce of prevention.