Mexican or Swine: What’s in a name?

Have you heard about the new flu that threatens to turn our brains to a mass of jiggling Jello and fill the streets of our major cities with flesh eating Zombies? I’m talking about the Mexican flu. Haven’t heard of that one yet? Maybe you were preoccupied by the recent swine flu epidemic and didn’t hear about the Mexican flu. I’ll bet if that’s the case, then you probably haven’t heard of the Obama flu either. If so, don’t worry. I’ll let you in on a little secret: they’re all the same disease. It’s just that different people like to call it by different names. Let me toss another name out for you: the H1N1 virus. That’s what scientists like to call the new flu strain, because they’re all into funny names that make no sense at all and like to make the rest of us feel stupid. H1N1… wasn’t that one of the robots from Star Wars?

OK, from here on out you can forget H1N1. The term is too clinical and doesn’t lend itself to demagogic politicizing important commentary the way the Mexican flu, the Obama flu, or even the swine flu does.

Take, for instance, the term “Mexican flu.” According to the group Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee, that’s what we should really be calling this new disease. And, you should probably listen to ALIPAC, since they know a thing or two about the importance of naming things in ways that are in no way meant to confuse or obfuscate. Consider…. oh, I don’t know… the acronym ALIPAC, for instance. Did you know that the group Americans for Legal Immigration is actually an anti-immigration group? Of course you did, it’s obvious from the name isn’t it? Like Democrats on abortion, ALIPAC wants immigration to be safe, legal, and rare… with an emphasis on the rare part. Also, they want everyone in the Obama administration fired for not doing enough to eradicate Mexicans and their flu:

“Clearly, the Obama administration cares more about politics and trade than protecting Americans and telling the truth,” said William Gheen of ALIPAC. “The delay in notifying the public about the Mexican Flu, refusing to adequately secure our borders, ordering our border patrol officers to not wear masks, and refusing to call this pandemic by its proper name is lowering confidence in his administration.”

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC is now calling for the resignation or firing of Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano due to her refusal to secure our borders and do what any rational American would consider appropriate to slow the progression of this emerging disease. Recent DHS orders for Border Patrol agents near San Diego to not wear masks to protect themselves is causing a stir across the nation.

Patrick J. Buchanan, on the other hand, isn’t as hung up on geography as ALIPAC. He knows that this new flu would be more properly labeled the Obama flu, and wouldn’t you know it, that just happens to be the title of his newest column in the American Conservative: The Obama Flu.

Because of the peril of swine flu, Joe Biden said yesterday, he would urge his family to stay out of “confined places” like airplanes and subways here in the United States.

Yet, the Obama administration will not consider closing the United States to airplanes and buses coming in from the epicenter of the epidemic, Mexico City.

Does this contradiction make sense?

America, at this writing, has recorded fewer than 100 cases of the swine flu. One victim has died, a 2-year-old Mexican boy. He was flown out of Mexico City to Matamoros, crossed over with his parents into Texas, was taken to a hospital in Brownsville, terribly sick, then transferred to a Houston hospital. There he died.

Clear from this is that Mexicans, seriously ill, may head for the United States, where the medical care is known to be far superior and also free for the indigent.

OK, I’ll admit:  unlike ALIPAC, Buchanan has a tough time staying on message. After all, only five words into his brilliant piece on Obama disease, he’s off referring to the Mexican wetback flu as the “swine flu.” Also unclear from his article is whether Buchanan hates the Obama administration or the Mexicans more. Lack of focus -5 points.  One thing’s for sure after reading his piece, though: seriously Ill Mexicans are sure to begin climbing fences, swimming rivers, slithering through rat infested drainage tunnels and braving the Sonora desert until they find themselves at death’s door, streaming into our hospitals seeking free treatment that is also being administered for free by teams of doctors in Mexico.

Rest assured, though, Buchanan’s concern is ultimately a humanitarian one as much as it is a racist one. As he notes:

According to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, in a normal flu season, 35,000 Americans die. Thirty-five thousand! That is more than 10 times the number who died on 9-11 and about as many as we lost in the Korean War.

More than 10 times the number that died on 9/11!!!! OMG!!!!! The Mexicans are 1o times worse than Osama bin Ladin and almost as bad as Kim Jung Il. Who’d a thunk it!?

And if this Mexican flu is anything like the Hong Kong flu that killed 33,000 Americans in 1968-69, or, Lord forbid, the Spanish Flu that killed 25 million to 50 million worldwide in 1918-19 — more Americans died from it than all the Americans killed in World Wars I and II combined — this administration is dangerously behind the curve.

Let’s just hope and pray this flu is like the Hong Kong flu, since we’d be saving 2000 lives over those that would be expected to be lost to a “normal” flu season. Hell, if it turns our to be like the Hong Kong flu I’ll personally be hosting an illegal Mexican guest worker in hopes my family will be among the lucky 2000. I know you will be, too.

That said, despite Obama’s insane failure to further strain our precarious economic situation by quarantining our second largest trading partner over a disease that has killed 16 people in Mexico and one baby in the U.S. new developments may, sadly, play right into the crooked Obama administration’s nefarious hands. For one thing, the flu might not be quite as bad as some were hoping fearing:

New York officials said after a week of monitoring the disease that the city’s outbreak gives little sign of spreading beyond a few pockets or getting more dangerous.

All but two of the city’s confirmed cases so far involve people associated with the high school where the local outbreak began and where several students had recently returned from Mexico.

More than 1,000 students, parents and faculty there reported flu symptoms over just a few days last month. But since then, only a handful of new infections have been reported — only eight students since last Sunday.

Almost everyone who became ill before then are either recovering or already well. The school, which was closed this past week, is scheduled to reopen Monday. No new confirmed cases were identified in the city on Friday, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the outbreak in New York had so far proved to be “a relatively minor annoyance.”

Even worse, the Mexican swine flu might not be Mexican at all… what we might actually be dealing with is… hold on to your hats, people… American swine flu??!!!

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Doctors tracking swine flu in this state are investigating a new theory: What if it didn’t originate in Mexico but instead had been floating around the border region for months?

Growing evidence in California suggests that early flu cases had no apparent origin in Mexico. Many of the early California victims — including the first two cases — say they hadn’t traveled to Mexico and had no contact with pigs. Some may have fallen ill before the first Mexicans did.

And what’s worse, according to the official propaganda organ of Communist Party USA, Wired Magazine, the swine flu may have originated due to capitalistic factory hug farming techniques:

Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic.

The new findings challenge recent protests by pork industry leaders and U.S., Mexican and United Nations agriculture officials that industrial farms shouldn’t be implicated in the new swine flu, which has killed 176 people and on Thursday was formally declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

“Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses,” said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a long-time critic of the so-called “contained animal feeding operations.”

As Wired.com reported on Tuesday, geneticists studying the composition of viruses taken from swine flu victims described it as the product of a DNA swap between North American and Eurasian swine flu strains.

It’s shocking to consider the possibility that Industrial farms could be better incubators of diease than Mexicans. After all, Lou Dobbs has been warning us for years that Mexicans are far more prolific disease carriers than rats and will soon kill us all with their infectious leprosy. However, should these latest theories be proven correct, it migth put a few people in an awkward position. Noneteless, I’d fully expect Pat Buchanan to call for the abolition of industrial pork farms and for ALIPAC to call for the re-naming of this virus as the American swine flu. You know… just to be consistent and all. Until that happens, though, rest assured: it’s still safe to hate Mexicans.