I was in DC when the anthrax mailings were scaring the hell out of everyone in 2001. In fact, my office mail was going through Brentwood, the same post office that the anthrax letters went through, and there were some questions about cross-contamination.
With that in mind, I’m not prepared to joke about poisonous toxins being sent through the mail to office holders in Washington. And yet, this AP report is enough to just make a guy scream about misplaced Republican priorities.
On the same day a poison-laced letter shuttered Senate offices, President Bush asked Congress to eliminate an $8.2 million research program on how to decontaminate buildings attacked by toxins.
Buried in documents justifying Bush’s 2005 budget proposal released Monday is an Environmental Protection Agency acknowledgment that his proposed cut “represents complete elimination of homeland security building decontamination research.”
The agency said in the documents that Bush’s proposal will “force it to disband the technical and engineering expertise that will be needed to address known and emerging biological and chemical threats in the future.”
The toxin ricin was discovered in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s office Monday. Intensive testing of the Tennessee Republican’s office mailroom in the Dirksen Senate Office Building has so far failed to locate the deadly poison’s origin.
The discovery – the second such attack on Senate offices since 2001 – came the same day the president’s budget was released. The EPA this week joined the FBI and 100 Marines from the corps’ Chemical Biological Incident Response Force to investigate, clean up and collect all mail from all congressional offices as a precaution.
No comment was immediately available from officials at the White House, the EPA or Frist’s office.
Of course not. There’s no easy way to explain that tax cuts for millionaires have to take precedent over everything, even national security.