Big Frick Dot Com

Welcome to a political opportunity of, well, pandemic proportions.

For those of us lucky enough to have dodged the bullet of “bird flu” a couple of years ago we are now faced with an even bigger plague of national destruction; the H1N1 media flu, I mean the H1N1 swine flu. This runny nosed nuisance is almost custom made for a political party in peril.

Just days after taking the oval office Barack Obama earmarked a billion dollars to fight the onset of what was gleefully forecasted by the media as an illness so profound that it could end life as we know it on the planet. Ten months later we are just beginning to receive the life saving serum specifically designed to thwart the disease.

News outlets are relentless in their daily updates of new case reports and the rising death toll attributed to the epidemic. At last count 1000 deaths have been attributed to the H1N1 virus in America so far this year. That certainly sounds ominous, right?

While the number of deaths may in fact be true, there are some other factoids that have been conveniently omitted from the reports. Like the fact that in that same time period 30,000 people have died of flu that was not the H1N1 strain. And by historic comparatives, those numbers mean we are experiencing a perfectly normal flu season.

What the media is failing to report is that every year in America 40,000 people die of generic influenza. Normally those who succumb to the flu are those particularly vulnerable like the very young, the very old and those with already diminished health. But historic statistics show that every year not all who die from the flu are in those most susceptible categories. Some are perfectly healthy who get the flu so serve that for any number of reasons they die. Tragic, yes. Unusual, unfortunately no.

During the “bird flu” scare a few years ago the country was told by the media medical talking heads to brace for a devastating flu season. Much blame was heaped on then President Bush for not being prepared to deal with this oncoming pandemic. We were told that while we had flu shots, the serum was for the wrong kind of flu strain and would likely not be effective against this budding bird borne blight. Some way, somehow we survived. And without even so much as a blip in the normal flu season mortality rate.

Bush was lax in any attempt to make political hay from this forecasted endemic disaster; Obama will not allow this opportunity to pass him likewise.

More than the billions of dollars in worldwide spending on appropriate antibodies, there is plenty of political capital to be made by averting the forecasted doom. The H1N1 flu has been a political tetherball since it first hit the newswires. Originally called the Mexican Swine Flu the name was changed to just Swine Flu once the Mexican government complained. Further complaints from pork producer’s associations had the named once again politically corrected to the scientific Nam de Plume H1N1.

Much like Nancy Pelosi’s ridiculous supposition that the non-stimulating stimulus passed by Congress is keeping the recession from being worse, the same approach will be taken with this media mania regarding H1N1. The fact that 30 times as many people have died from non-H1N1 related influenza, even before the proper antibodies hit the market, will likely never be mentioned. Only that the Messiah has saved the country a much worse fate than would have otherwise befallen us. There is, of course, no way to prove or disprove the hypothesis of Obamian intervention so it will be ladled out for mass consumption like momma’s chicken soup. The fact that most who do get the H1N1 brand of flu will recover with no extraordinary medical intervention will also be glaringly apparent by its omission from the discussion.

When it comes to the campaign happy Obama administration no opportunity is too small to take credit. Especially when everything else they have done has only made the situation worse.

It really is enough to make you sick.