Quake3World

We know with some certainty that we're not at all prepared for such an event. The government conducted a series of large-scale drills that provided a terrifying glimpse into what such a scenario might look like.

In 2000, local, state and federal agencies simulated a release of the plague in Denver, Colorado and public health authorities and their infrastructure were quickly overwhelmed. Three days into the simulation, the agencies noted ominously that: "Medical care is 'beginning to shut down' in Denver." Within a week of the outbreak, civil unrest broke out, as people panicked. As the drill progressed: "Stores were closed. Food supplies ran out because no trucks were being let into the state. Rioting began to occur." When the exercise was terminated, the simulated disease was raging out of control and had spread to other cities.

Think the administration might do something to head off such a scenario? Think again. Avoiding a biological catastrophe requires what's known as "surge capacity"--the ability of a healthcare system to handle an abnormally large influx of casualties. That surge capacity is not profitable--it comes from the kind of public health spending the right abhors. We currently have about a third fewer beds per capita than we did at the start of the "Reagan Revolution," and a third fewer than developed countries with universal healthcare systems.

I asked Terrence O'Sullivan, an expert in bioterror at the Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) how the party in power was doing since 9/11. He said we have a "crisis in biosecurity," and explained:

It's a local and state public health problem, first and foremost, and requires repairing the fragile public health and emergency medical infrastructures at those levels. Homeland Security money for bioterrorism countermeasures has been more than offset by cutbacks in government funding to public health, in part because of ideological antigovernmentalism and federal tax cuts at a time of massive spending on the Iraq war. In short, for biosecurity we're robbing Peter to pay Paul, and then some.

In other words, we remain vulnerable because of the administration's political philosophy.

That philosophy goes further, right to the heart of Rove's smear: conservatives love the politics of war--they love talking about it in breathlessly heroic terms, they love mission-accomplished banners and they love pounding their chests for the TV cameras. But that predisposes them to playing offense without enough attention to defense. By most accounts, Iraq is both a recruiting tool and a training ground for new terrorists, while back home we're left exposed.

Stephen Flynn, a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us From Terrorism (HarperCollins, 2004), wrote in Foreign Affairs that, three years after 9/11:

The transportation, energy, information, financial, chemical, food, and logistical networks that underpin U.S. economic power and the American way of life offer the United States' enemies a rich menu of irresistible targets. And most of these remain virtually unprotected.

Flynn wrote about cargo containers not being inspected, weak security at nuclear and chemical plants and a host of other vulnerabilities and concluded: "the United States is fighting the war it prepared for in the twentieth century, rather than the one that is being waged upon it by al Qaeda."

That's about political philosophy, too. The right has an almost obsessive reliance on the private sector to do the right thing. But soft targets won't be strengthened by "market forces" alone. There's no profit in it, so the job requires heavy public subsidies. Which is why the right's ideologically constrained from hardening our vital infrastructure.

Those who study the writings and ideals of the men who risked everything to form this nation see very clearly the ideology of the left is far removed from the ideology of those who created this nation. The left stands on the opposite side of the founders on issues of gun ownership, religion, taxes, personal liberty, respect for life, and the size of government. To be blunt the ideology of the left is rooted not in the Constitution the founders gave us. Rather it is based in the Communist Manifesto in many ways.