You Don’t Know Dick… Cheney.

January 29, 2008

Yes, I am shamelessly stealing A Daily Show feature but I can’t help myself. Our VP is an unbelievably frightening moron.

One of my favorite weekly rituals is sitting down for a few hours and reading the latest Newsweek. I read the cover story about Bush’s legacy (who would have thought that he would have made his father look so much better in comparison?). (By the way, how sad is it that the only thing I want from this last year of his presidency is to have him not engage us in a war with Iran? It seems really, really sad to me. I’ve given up all hope that he will even begin to bring our troops home, that he can help our ailing economy, and all I want from the man is to not have him drag this country into another war. He cannot leave office fast enough for me.)

After the cover story, there was a book excerpt from Jacob Weisberg’s The Bush Tragedy and I thought hey, why not read this even though I have no idea what “Unipolar Realism” means since it seems like a contradiction in terms. But the excerpt did indeed prove to be very interesting.

Remember the 2001 Anthrax Attacks? Dick Cheney sure does.

In the book excerpt (Fishing For A Way To Change The World), Weisberg recounts the fear that permeated the White House after the anthrax attacks.

According to a source close to Bush, Cheney swiftly reported back to the Oval Office with a sobering message: the United States was essentially defenseless against the most likely form of assault, a biological attack. “I sat through the most gruesome briefing in the Oval Office about anthrax, how it could spread, and how we had no defenses,” Bush’s first press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told me in the summer of 2007. “Dick Cheney was the strongest advocate of the possibility of attack and need to prepare for it.”–(Fishing For A Way…)

As a few more anthrax attacks occurred, Cheney and Libby (according to Weisberg) started to spend a great deal of time at the Health and Human Services Department. They had somehow made the leap from anthrax attacks to… smallpox attacks.

The greatest fear of officials there[the Department of Health and Human Services] was an attack involving smallpox. The smallpox virus killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century. It was still taking 2 million lives a year as late as 1967, when the World Health Organization began the massive campaign that wiped out the disease a decade later. After smallpox was eradicated in 1977, only the United States and Russia were permitted to retain research samples of the virus, under closely monitored, secure conditions. But an intelligence review ordered by Cheney determined that Iraq, North Korea, and Russia were all likely to possess undeclared stocks.

Their speculation about a possible smallpox attack lead to this very frightening development:

Cheney and Libby believed that Iraq’s potential to produce a smallpox weapon necessitated universal vaccination of the general population, something that hadn’t happened in the United States since 1972.–(Fishing For A Way…)

When I read about how serious Cheney was about vaccinating EVERY SINGLE AMERICAN AGAINST SMALLPOX I completely freaked out. Hence the caps and boldness. According to the sources Weisberg spoke with, Cheney was absolutely dead-set on the nation-wide vaccination. Which makes Dick Cheney a more crazy, and evil person than I had ever thought possible. It’s one thing to shoot your friend in the face, it’s another thing to bring back smallpox.

Since I desperately wanted to be a Virologist when I grew up, I know quite a bit about smallpox and vaccines in general. Most of us know that a vaccine is simply a live strain of a virus that has been created to cause little damage to the person being vaccinated, but to introduce enough live virus into their system for their body to build up an immunity to it. (Dick Cheney obviously does not know this.) This is why vaccinations can sometimes be dangerous–you’re dealing with a live virus.

In school, we were taught about controlled burns and how they actually help mature the Sequoia trees and how essential they are to the tree’s survival. Vaccines are like controlled burns–you use them when you need them, and blast them into the people who are most at-risk. Vaccinating the entire country against smallpox would be like setting an uncontrolled burn. A forest fire. A complete and absolute disaster.

According to Weisberg:

On the other side of the argument was Donald Henderson, the heroic epidemiologist who led the WHO smallpox eradication program and later became Bush 41’s science adviser. After the anthrax attacks, HHS brought Henderson in as a consultant to help develop emergency plans.–(Fishing For A Way…)

I LOVE Donald Henderson. He wrote a really nifty Bioterrorism book. I’ve also read a great deal about him and his work with the WHO Smallpox Eradication Program. We should all thank our lucky stars that Dr. Henderson jumped on a plane as soon as he heard that Cheney had talked Bush into issuing a press announcement about having all of America vaccinated against smallpox.

Dr. Henderson explained to Bush and Cheney that they are total morons (okay, he probably didn’t say it quite that way) and that it was a terrible idea. He explained that you are introducing a live virus into the public and that some people will inevitably contract smallpox, with all of the lovely pustules and lesions and scabs and other symptoms, and that some people would die from it. Others could suffer a bad reaction and have their body ruined by it, probably making them wish they HAD died. Nevermind the fact that you are introducing smallpox back into the general public. After briefing Bush and Cheney about the seroiusness and total futility of a mass vaccination, Dr. Henderson felt that he had convinced them to not go through with the press release. The fact that he had brochures and pictures of people who suffered horribly from smallpox vaccinations probably had something to do with the sudden change of heart.

But! Dick Cheney has NO HEART. Even after being told by the doctor who helped eradicate smallpox that mass vaccinations was insane, Cheney was determined to go through with it.

When he [Dr. Henderson] reached his home in Baltimore two hours later, Henderson’s wife was waiting with an urgent message to call the office. “They were going to have a press release the next morning announcing that they were going to vaccinate the entire country immediately,” Henderson said. “I couldn’t believe it.” But after girding for battle and taking a 5:00 a.m. train to HHS the next morning, Henderson was relieved to be told that the vaccination plan was off after all. Bush had overruled Cheney.–(Fishing For A Way…)

I’d never thought I’d say this but: Way to go, Dubya. Who would have thought that you, of all people, would EVER be the Voice Of Questionable Reason? Bush’s compromise with Cheney involved vaccinating the military and some health/medical personnel, and anyone in and close to the White House.

But the vaccine wasn’t ready for use until 2004, by which time all of the panic about a bioterrorism attack had burned away.

Then comes my absolute favorite part of the excerpt. I sincerely hope that some of you read this far because it will, undoubtedly, become your favorite part, too.

But by the time the vaccine was ready for use, in early 2004, the panic was over. Saddam didn’t have a smallpox weapon after all. Bush was vaccinated at the White House, but decided that members of his family and the White House staff didn’t need to run the risk. Cheney himself chose not to be vaccinated.–(Fishing For A Way…)

Cheney chose to not be vaccinated! He was going to throw ALL of us under the bus but, when faced with the horrible complications that could arise from receiving the smallpox vaccine, he decided he didn’t want to do it. Dick Cheney is EVIL. He needs to get out of office and go back to shooting his friends in the face.

(Since this is already an overly long entry, I will not even begin to broach the topic of bioterrorism and how woefully under-prepared we are for a large scale bioterror attack. No one is taught what to do in the event of a biological attack, no one has a kit at home with a face mask and other items that would protect them from a biological attack, everyone just seems to think that vaccines will save us. They won’t. They’ll save some of us… maybe. If we’re lucky enough that the vaccines we have stockpiled will vaccinate against whatever strain of smallpox is used as a bioterror weapon. But this will obviously have to an entry later on… sometime. Someday. Hopefully.)

Posted in Dispatch