Predictably enough, wingers are trying to turn the swine flu outbreak into a way to bash immigrants.
It will be interesting to see if the Village goes into “Obama needs to do something to stop the swine flu” mode. I’m not sure if invading Mexico or torturing people to find out where the swine flu came from is the answer.
But if Obama looks weak to the flu virus, we can expect a lot more flu viruses to attack us. I know that much.
Lola
Ha! Good one.
Living in Texas, I do worry the swine flu will stir up anti-immigrant hate beyond the already high level. It is sad how stupid so many people are.
Punchy
I’ve heard from a trusted source that Obama has called in Navy SEALS to sniper-fire all the flu viruses into oblivion.
And then make a movie about it, natch.
blogenfreude
Even better: did you know that Obama causes swine flu and earthquakes?
Booferama
we must send navy snipers after the swine flu! But if they succeed, it will not be to Obama’s credit! Huzzah!
Update: nuts: Punchy beat me to the punch.
Hunter Gathers
These people have no friggin’ shame whatsoever.
Swine Flu – it’s the dirty brown Mexican’s fault
Torture – who cares if some dirty brown Arabs are forced to endure ‘enhanced interrogation’, I is scared
Gay Marriage – I is scared of teh gay, in fact they might turn me into teh gay
Practically every one of thier positions can be traced to some level of fear/hate.
Ah, to be white, middle aged, willfully ignorant and scared at the same time. I’m amazed that these people find the strength to go to work in the morning.
Montysano
Hey, it couldn’t hurt.
Kthxbai,
Dick
@the bunker
Dork
@Punchy: Couldn’t we just wiretap the viruses and find out where they plan on traveling next?
Or even better: hit all the infected people with Willy Pete, since it doesn’t burn or anything, and will discourage the pigs from flu’ing up others.
R-Jud
Shorter news media: We’re all (still) going to die!
I am waiting for this to be connected to the “Obama is the Antichrist”/ End Times prophecies.
Or at least, waiting for one of y’all brave enough to venture into Outer Wingnuttia to come back here and tell us all about it.
Face
Maybe people should eat the damn pigs, instead of making out with them, or however one transmits the flu.
Maybe we should just blame Steven Hatfill for this.
El Cid
If Bill Clinton hadn’t refused when Sudan offered to give the swine flu up, none of this would have happened. It’s all the fault of the Clinton Crime Syndicate.
CapMidnight
Threaten the Gitmo detainees with putting a swine flu in the cell with them! Then they’d squeal!
And I think Jack Bauer knows more than he’s telling about 24-hour bugs.
Brachiator
Yeah, it’s pretty clear from the google maps showing the flu victims that we need to close the border between Scotland and Mexico.
On the other hand, I just love how some people read illegal immigrants and automatically recast it as just immigrants.
Savage and his ilk are nativist fools. It’s too bad that their idiocy almost makes intelligent discussion about immigration reform impossible.
joe from Lowell
It would be merely an acute episode.
XXXOOO,
The Honorable Jay Bybee
DougJ
I blame Jamie Gorelick for putting that wall between the CDC and the FBI.
Krista
I’m sure you won’t have to wait long. I’ve already seen some of that crap in comments sections on some of the nuttier blogs, but no actual posts yet.
Give it a day or so.
PeakVT
Predictably enough, wingers are trying to turn the swine flu outbreak into a way to bash immigrants.
Have they tried to link it Islamofascism yet? Or would we even know? I suspect stupidity of that scale would collapse the space-time continuum around anyone who seriously thought al-Qaeda was behind the outbreak.
El Cid
@DougJ: The seeds of this crisis were sown long before, back when Jimmy Carter used the CRA to force gene banks to give swine flu loans to black people who otherwise couldn’t afford them.
And then Barney Frank used his position as a minority committee member to stop the Republicans from reforming HHS.
Booferama
ZOMG! Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster because he knew about swine flu!
Steve V
I was listening to a right wing AM station on the way home from work yesterday and the guy was talking about all the police powers the president has in a time of a public health emergency, and was almost suggesting that Obama should declare a curfew or martial law or something, and he’d be a wimp if he didn’t. My daily dose of right wing dissonance.
Michael
@hunter
It’s all the manifest courage, Hunter.
Scrolling down a few favorite wingnut sites (the FReak and LibertyPost), it was clear early on that a contingent of folks (the sorts who look upon an obscenely and unnecessarily expensive trip to ride go-karts, play putt-putt and buy t-shirts in Gatlinburg as a luxurious getaway to an exotically intriguing location) are gleefully rubbing their hands together over some suspension of leisure travel to Mexico.
Sometimes, I really despise a lot of my fellow Southerners.
Laura W Darling
I heard Michelle put her arm around a Mexican.
Zach
Obama should, today, have an afternoon press conference that wraps up in time for the evening news in which he explicitly quotes Duncan Hunter exploiting this to try and close the borders, decries him for being a reactionary idiot, and announces the deployment of some amount of army reserve medics to cities in Mexico to help out, a hotline for volunteers who have time/ability to help, and a shipment of masks, tamiflu, etc to Mexico.
George
You can think whatever you want… just make sure you have Purell and a good full face hood like the Breath of Life Mask.
http://www.ProactiveAndPrepared.com
Brachiator
@Steve V:
Not dissonant at all. Conservatives get a hard on from having the federal government kick a designated scapegoat’s ass, but the scapegoat must not be a White Christian Heterosexual Gun Owner.
JoyceH
Our response will be, hey – he already has. You mean they didn’t notice that hospital admissions in Mexico City have been declining SINCE that earthquake? CoINcidence? I think not!
That was the detonation of Jedi Master Obama’s Flu Eradication Device.
Hey, just because he doesn’t strut and swagger and boast like their pathetic little ‘Decider’ doesn’t mean he’s not taking action. That’s our O Man – subtle!
Napoleon
@Hunter Gathers:
Maybe 2 weekends ago Bob Edwards had a writer on his show who has a new collection out of his magazine pieces, and among other pieces he had writen was one he did, apparently at the beginning of his career, for Husler on hard right Christianist movement. I guess he had just been clean from substance abuse a few weeks and he was scared of what taking on the story may do to him. But he told Bob Edwards that the thing that surprised him the most of the Christianist he interviewed as part of the story was that how they were absolutely scared of everything, and that despite his troubled past he was nothing next to them.
Comrade Kevin
I think we need to take the term “the Village” and “throw it under the bus”.
JL
Smithfield Farms pig factory is being investigated as the possible source of the out break of swine flu. How will the whackos respond to the deaths of 125 Mexicans if the source is an company from VA.
Bill H
Well, of course. According to Pat Buchanan they have brought all kinds of things; tuberulosis, measles, even bedbugs. He stopped short of mentioning leprosy, leaving that to Lou Dobbs.
Tsulagi
If it was the previous admin, they’d already be planning shock and awe on Costa Rica. Their intel and brilliant divining of the truth would tell them there’s brown people with bugs there too collaborating with those in Mexico. Wolfowitz would be telling Congress a Costa Rica invasion would pay for itself in increased coffee exports.
joe from Lowell
I’m willing to make a prediction about the politics of the Swine Flu pandemic:
The Republicans will run around like idiots, issuing all sorts of scathing attacks on Barack Obama, frequently putting forward attacks that contradict their last, failed attack. Meanwhile, Barack Obama will be calm and deliberate, and delegate power to effective subordinates while talking soothingly to the American people, all the while moving forward with his legislative agenda.
When the situation ends and we look back on it, the Republicans will look they were running around like idiots and throwing out all sorts of frivolous charges, while the Barack Obama acted calming and deliberately while the problem was dealt with very effectively.
And the enormous legislative agenda will have continued to progress all the while.
See “Pirates” or “Suspend Campaign.”
joe from Lowell
Oh, and the Congressional Republicans will occasionally attempt to put on a media push for some wholly-unrelated wingnut policy. Each time, it will vanish like a stone down a dark well within 48 hours.
Ella in NM
Oh, the genius, Alex Jones, one ups that theory. It’s an engineered virus the Iluminati/ New World Order folks made in a lab, dropped into the middle of Mexico, and are now eagerly rubbing their hands together in anticipation of reducing the entire earth’s population by 40% (because those folks are also apparently of the opinion that we are overpopulated) and they are already sizing up concentration camp sites all over the country so that they can take over EVERYTHING…bwaahahahahhahahhha!!!!!!!!!
R-Jud
@Ella in NM:
Hmmm. That is some tasty crazy. But it needs more reptilians.
Elie
Y’all are really making me laugh hard today — thanks..
On the serious side, don’t be surprised if the final verdict on this thing as alluded to up @ # 28 is related to hog farms. You have very stressed animals in high concentrations tended by poor, stressed humans — also in the same horrible, toxic environment. Not a surprise that you would get a viral “species jump”…
The next couple of weeks will tell us a lot about the virulence of the strain. Though the media has not been discussing the hog farm angle that loudly yet, Nightline last night did address it as a possibility. If so, I welcome an open public discussion of these horrible feed lot ranches that are both inhumane and totally toxic to the environment (inlcuding our water). We cannot have our food obtained like this at such costs. I hope that there is the beginning of a broad and open discussion about this…
scarshapedstar
This is all Bill Clinton’s fault. Instead of nuking Mexico after their first bioterrorist flu attack, he shot one cruise missile. He made us look weak. Now it’s time to look strong.
Let’s roll!
Cindy
It looks like swine flu is spreading very fast… http://www.swinefluworldmap.com/
Rainboskies
You people are sooooo, crazy!! I see no one mentioned that Harry Reid said he “could smell the vistors coming into the Capital” and was RELIEVED the new Vistors Center is opened. I don’t recall a Repub. saying on public record taxpayers “stunk”
An Independent
General Honore, who brought New Orleans out of the stone age after Katrina, seems to agree that we should shut down travel to and from Mexico and have taken other steps (which you might even call draconian) in regards to enforcing health policy and treatment. While everyone here I’m sure will probably be throwing an Obama 100 Day Report Card party tonight, he hasn’t done what a leader is supposed to do, which is take the initiative.
Instead, he’s been entirely reactive–which really isn’t any kind of leadership at all.
Oh, I know, it would be terrible if we shut down the borders…cheap labor barons would howl, left wingers would whine, Mexican drug cartels would hate us more for making their drug trafficking/war harder to pursue, and all kinds of social services money for illegal aliens would go unspent (holy vast right-wing conspiracy, we can’t have that!)…
A government’s first responsibility is to its people, those it governs, and who have consented to be governed by it–not to the international community, not to a neighbor–and certainly not to Mexico, our biggest national security threat outside of Guitar Hero wielding teens and taser-happy cops. I mean, it’s been on the verge of failed state status for nearly two years. Sort of like our economy, which Bush and Congress ignored.
I don’t like Republicans or Democrats, since both are screwing up our nation, and both parties have dropped the ball on this. Whether or not the swine flu goes pandemic, it only has to kill a few people in order to justify what a significant portion of the population is talking about, which is secession. A government that failed to protect the lives of citizens (because of convenience, feel-good foreign relations…whatever) when it could have prevented their deaths abdicates its legitimacy.
As a veteran who fought for my country (which was really more fun that majoring in eBusiness), believe me when I say that if people in my family or circle of friends end up dying or suffering permanent disabilities (such as several hundred who took vaccines for the outbreak/scare in the 70’s did) because the President and Congress were too busy: dancing, protesting Darfur, backslapping with dictators, bowing and scraping to Saudi royalty, bailing out the crooks who ruined our economy, setting up Air Force One photo-ops, playing with politically correct BO the Portugese Water Spaniel (awww cute…he’s black and white, sports a rainbow colored lei and comes from a Kennedy!), molesting Congressional pages, and force millions of Americans to grow up and live in a country where we have to endure Rush Limbaugh, Nancy Pelosi, Newt (“She turned me into a newt!” “A newt?” “…I got better.”) Gingrich, Al Sharpton and Britney Spears….I will gladly take a page out of the playbook of America’s Revolutionary forefathers.
As General (Ret.) Honore said, you over-fund, you over-prepare, take initiative and act proactively. You don’t stand around watching (or in Obama’s case, getting down on the dance floor for photo-ops…probably why he wasn’t aware of the photo-op that scared the hell out of Manhattan and most of NYC) twiddling your thumbs as Obama and his administration have done.
As far as bashing immigrants, I’ve not heard any of that coming from the right, though I hear a lot of angst over illegal aliens–which are a different thing altogether. While we’re at it, Obama could put the economy on the fast track to recovery and stop illegal immigration in one move by hiring 100,000 new border patrol agents or soldiers and locking the border down. Oh, but horror of horrors, that might offend someone who isn’t even American…
And gosh we can’t afford that since we’re throwing $750 million into the parks services and youth jobs…which will do wonders for heads of households and breadwinners. Again, who cares when we’re giving away billions to the bankers and speculators and morally decrepit execs who got us into this mess in the first place, right?
And hey, if we’re talking snipers and faking things here, how about that Hillary dodging snipers in Bosnia? The same one not even eligible for her post according to the Constitution…which, uhm, nowhere says she can be eligible if Congress votes a decrease in pay…but it’s just a piece of paper, so never mind.
I’ve got a garden to go tend to, code to hack and I want to look for a good price on bulk ammunition and surgical masks before Extreme Makeover: Home Edition comes on. (Doesn’t it just make you well up inside, people helping people?) Sorry I can’t stay and join the campfire sing-a-long to Kumbaya or whatever I’m sure will be sung on CNN tonight.
joe from Lowell
I used to live in DC. Reid was right.
People who walk around outside in Washington, D.C. in the summer for any length of time smell bad.
John
I worry about the implications of the Swine Flu on out psyches…An article on MSNBC today is suggesting that we practice “social distancing” by reducing human contact by up to 50%. Danger Will Robinson!
I thought I’d lighten the mood with a couple Swine Flu Parodies:
http://www.wickedsweetvideos.com/2009/04/swine-flu-prepare-plan-and-stay.html
America
Does anyone actually know how long The Obama Flu lingers in a room or environment, or on a surface, after the carrier has left the area. I’ve read 2 to 8 hours for measles, but nothing yet on the O-Bug.
trevo
I have been checking on this swine flu tracking website http://www.swine-flu-tracker.com/ on and off for the last couple of days now and its kinda scary seeing how it this strain of flu is spreading.
JF
ImmuneRegen’s (www.ImmuneRegen.com) compound Homspera is a strong candidate as a therapeutic and / or adjuvant to pandemic influenza including swine flu. The compound has demonstrated greater effectiveness than Tamiflu. Why isn’t the government expediting the development of candidates like these?
Ferthyr Terlewen
Verification is anticipated late today for the foremost example of to human human carry-over of swine influenza in the UK. It is believed to be a friend of Lain and Dawn Askham, who were the inaugural confirmed victims in the United Kingdom and they contacted subsequently after their return from honeymoon in Mexico. Initially the man was discharged but after his symptoms carried on he was re tested and was detected to be suffering from Type A flu. Examinations are still in progress but are anticipated to confirm swine flu. This instantly takes the aggregate number of swine flu sufferers in GB to 8 -that is 6 in England 2 in Scotland but hitherto no deaths.
Elizabeth
@Ella in NM:
Has anyone considered that this could be an act of terrorism? There’s a lot that the government and CDC does not want us to know to avoid major panic. Bin Laden said that there would be another attack much bigger than the twin towers. What if the terrorists have in their possession viruses (and anti-viruses) that they can easily contaminate an animal or human and it spreads deadly diseases. Why start in Mexico? Why not, it’s easy with the corrupt government there you can do anything. And this virus has now mutated into a combo of human, bird, and pork flu (new name for it is H1N1). This is going to be worse than the Spanish Influenza in 1918 that killed approx. 20 to 100 million people all over the world from 1918 to 1920! Is this symbolic that history repeats itself 70 years later? The Spanish Influenza was also called H1N1 and I’m certain this current flu will also last years, it will kill many more millions of people and will further damage the world’s economy causing a meltdown that no man can remedy. Have we read the prophesies in the oldest book on earth, the Bible? Luke 21:11 states “and there will be great earthquakes, and in one place after another pestilences and food shortages, and there will be fearful sights…”; Luke 21:25-26 states “Also, there will be signs …on the earth anguish of nations, not knowing the way out …while men become faint out of fear and expectation of the things coming upon the inhabited earth…”; Matthew 24:21-22 states “for then there will be great tribulation such as has not occurred since the world’s beginning until now …. unless those days were cut short, no flesh would be saved…” Were these prophesies written a long time ago warning us of the end of days, showing us how to survive it and telling us what is in store for us in a new world?
Sarah
I think everything is going to be ok. A friend sent me a link to this website that takes the info from the CDC and puts it into an animated map:
http://www.swine-flu-map-animation.com/
It looks kind of cool, but if you look at the stats below it is still only 141 confirmed cases in all of the U.S. Not as crazy and scary as everyone is making it out to be.
KLo
There is definitely a political repercussion to this … but it might just be a bit different than what some are thinking.
http://philosophyofklo.blogspot.com/2009/05/stay-home-if-swine-flu-is-possibility.html