By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Bird Flu
Why is the bird flu big news? Birds have always flown. You mean avian influenza? OK, that’s different, but still What does that have to do with the price of eggs?
Word’s gone viral since a second case of bird flu was found last month at an Ottawa County chicken farm. Most chickens can’t fly, at least far enough to dive-bomb Saugatuck. But the pathogenic disease can spread to other beasts, even humans.
But wait, that’s not all! Paired below last week’s newspaper story “Bird flu sends egg prices soaring” was one even more alarming.
It dealt with John F. and Jackie Kennedy’s daughter Caroline calling her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, a “predator.”
Caroline accused Bobby and Ethel’s son for preying on everyone from family members to parents of sick children.
“I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together,” she claimed in a letter to lawmakers prior to his confirmation hearings. A vote was expected post-Groundhog’s Day, too late for this week’s deadline.
“It’s no surprise,” Caroline went on, “he keeps birds of prey as his pets because he himself is a predator.” She went on to call Jr. a hypocrite for discouraging parents from vaccinating their children while vaccinating his own, plus feeding his “addiction to attention and power” through an anti-vax campaign that has enriched him.
Through “the strength of his personality,” his not-so-kissing cousin said, other family members followed Jr. “down the path of drug addition …
“His basement, his garage, his dorm room were all centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks.”
Didn’t Bobby Sr. run for president as an anti-Vietnam War “dove” before being gunned down in 1968? What a family. To think my brother and I headed for Hyannis Port one winter to pay a surprise visit to the Camelot clan … for what? Croquet on the lawn overlooking Nantucket Sound?
Compound gates were locked in the snow with no Kennedy there to greet us. So we spent the night in a Cape Cod motel room, cheap in the offseason, then were forced to flee after it caught fire. Meanwhile Jr. was in the basement mixing up the medicine — small-creature smoothies, yum! — during his prep to be Free World Leader.
Anyway eggs, per the press, cost $4.15 per dozen last month, up from $1.48 in December four years ago. Here’s where Trump naming Jr. HHS Head is a stroke of genius.
First, Bobby makes sure no one (except his kids) is vaccinated for bird flu. Then he feeds Ottawa baby chicks to his hawks while drug cartel lobbyists (legal of course) get stoned in his hall and thrall.
See, when one or more chickens are found infected, the whole flock must be slaughtered to try to contain the virus. Supply of eggs drops, prices rise for them.
Feeding baby chicks to hawks can pre-empt this. Better, dispatch the raptors (if infected by their snacks) as gifts to errant family members with cards tied to talons saying things like, “Thanks for the kind note, Caroline.”
One columnist for this newspaper wrote last year that Jr. — during his presidential campaign that did not take wing — might make a good alternative to then-assumed party nominees Trump and Biden.
“Hear hear!” I said — but not here and now after hearing Jr. in 2014 found a dead bear cub by the roadside, took it home in his van planning to skin and eat it, but got waylaid. Seems he’d been falconing with friends in upstate New York that afternoon, then dined at New York City’s Peter Luger Steak House (where you can get a nice porterhouse for just $147.90), which made him even later.
“I had to go to the airport,” he told journalist(?) Roxanne Barr, “and I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad.”
One of his friends suggested they dump the cub in a Central Park bike lane, then place a bicycle (also in the van, for some reason) on top of the bear, suggesting the bike had hit it.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course,” he told the canceled comedienne in a YouTube video. “but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea. So we went and did that.”
That’s what we need in high office: doers. Especially Dewar’s Scotch fueled. The bear find made national headlines next morning, as did Jr.’s ‘fessing up 10 years later, then speculating “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.” But that’s another story.
In times like these — with the price of eggs soaring and IQs plunging — it’s good to know Trump has picked a candidate who can bear up under any test.
