A Campaign of Fear

Following up on Robin's piece -- Bill Safire is angry. He's angry that this year's campaign is being turned into a campaign of fear.

Funny thing though -- he thinks the campaign doing this is the -- get this -- Kerry campaign.

That's right -- Safire says the fear is not being mongered by the people who gave us "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud". Bill says the fearmonger's pitch tries to scare oldsters that Bush will privatise Social Security (skipping past the fact that Bush has said, if elected to a second term, he will privatise social security).
It's not a fear, so much as it is a fact. Seems Safire confuses fearmongering with telling the facts.

Oh, and he's blaming Kerry for talking too much about the flu vaccine shortage -- which is a failure of our public health people. By the way, we're all too young to remember what happens before we had the flu vaccine. But what happens is this: millions of people die. And that was in 1918, before we had international airplane travel. We bloody well should be freaked out that there's a shortage of vaccine, and we should also bloody well take notice that this is a public health issue -- meaning it's one that has to be lead on by governments. And the US failed, here. Yeah, so, the onslought of a global pandemic, wrought by poor public health planning in our government halls -- that seems a legitimate concern -- the kind which people ought to respond to by moving to northern Greenland.