George W. Bush in 2005: 'If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare'

Good Morning America via Yahoo ^ | April, 5, 2005 | MATTHEW MOSK

[granada]

In the summer of 2005, President George W. Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he began flipping through an advance reading copy of a new book about the 1918 flu pandemic. He couldn't put it down.

When he returned to Washington, he called his top homeland security adviser into the Oval Office and gave her the galley of historian John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza," which told the chilling tale of the mysterious plague that "would kill more people than the outbreak of any other disease in human history."

"You've got to read this," Fran Townsend remembers the president telling her. "He said, 'Look, this happens every 100 years. We need a national strategy.'"

[granada]

2005? The year liberal media exploited the hurricane Katrina to drive down GWB's approval rating?

[Buckeye McFrog]

translation: This is your fault, America, for electing the Kenyan buffoon.

[FreedomPoster]

Clearly it was all Bush’s faulty the corrupt NOLA government couldn’t properly maintain levees and pumping stations, and that Nagin couldn’t use the school buses to evacuate large numbers of people, instead allowing them to be flooded in their depots.

[21twelve]

Thanks - a really interesting read and videos. Bush got it. But obviously it got pushed to the side by things deemed more important by the Obama presidency. Gay rights, muslim outreach, global warming and solar panels, etc.

[tired&retired]

In 2000 you could say the same thing about a domestic attack on the World Trade Towers happening AGAIN!

Thanks Clinton!!!

[Theophilus]

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
H.L. Mencken, In Defense Of Women

[FES0844]

His son, along with Carter & Clinton, should be speaking out in support of PT and all those working round the clock to save lives. They are all a disgrace.

[nuconvert]

I wonder if the liberals at Good Morning America realized how negatively this would reflect on Obama?

[03A3]

Bush got it.

Let me get this straight.....the idiot that couldnt predict the housing fiasco of lending to everyone regardless of their ability to pay, was somehow prescient enough to predict a pandemic?

[laconic]

GWBush could have spent the EIGHT TRILLION on pandemic prevention that he wasted on his unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Squeako]

Sounds like a confession.

[Savage Beast]

Too bad George Bush lacked the wit to understand the dangers of open borders and squandering the nation’s wealth by spending more of the tax payers’ money than any President since Lyndon Johnson!