One lucky terrorist clutches the Bush Adminstration’s greatest nightmare, the uranium-equipped Vaccinatron 2000, which threatens to carry black-market flu vaccines into America’s largest cities, thereby obliterating all old people
From “Bush Defends Himself Against Kerry’s Charges”, the Washington Post, October 20, 2004:
President Bush pivoted sharply to domestic issues Tuesday, parrying Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry’s charges that the president had bungled the flu-vaccine program and would undermine Social Security in a second term.
With two weeks to go before Election Day, Kerry, fighting to reduce a small deficit in opinion polls, condemned Bush’s policies on health care and economic matters. Bush largely dropped the offensive he started Monday against Kerry’s credentials on security issues, moving quickly to defend his domestic record and charging that Kerry was willing to make outlandish assertions to win election.
[…]
Kerry aides said that in shifting to domestic concerns, Bush was responding to recent polls that show him with a narrow lead over Kerry but also show majorities of Americans saying the country is headed in the wrong direction. Bush aides said the president was not being defensive on domestic matters but rather tarring Kerry as a fear-monger using “old-style scare tactics” and as a candidate who would say anything to get elected – a charge Bush used effectively against Al Gore four years ago.
From “Kerry Discovers Flu Vaccine Shortage in Battle Against Bush”, Bloomberg, October 20, 2004:
Bill Pierce, a spokesman for Thompson, defended the Bush administration’s handling of the flu-vaccine issue. “What we don’t need people to do is scare seniors,” he said. “Senator Kerry has been doing that.”
And, finally, the coup de grace, from “Cheney, Invoking the Specter of a Nuclear Attack, Questions Kerry’s Strength”, the New York Times, October 20, 2004:
Vice President Dick Cheney cast doubt Tuesday on whether Senator John Kerry was strong enough to fight terrorism, and asserted that the nation might one day face terrorists “in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us,” including a nuclear bomb.
As he toured southern Ohio by bus seeking to energize Republican supporters, Mr. Cheney hit hard on a central theme of the Bush campaign: that the president has a better grasp than Mr. Kerry of the threats facing the nation, and the will to stymie terrorists. As in previous campaigning, the vice president invoked the specter of terrorists’ attacking an American city.
“The biggest threat we face now as a nation,” he said, “is the possibility of terrorists’ ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us – biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind – to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”