The office of the Vice President is vehemently denying that Mr. Cheney petitioned Israel to launch air strikes on a suspected Iranian nuclear installation so that U.S. forces could respond to the anticipated Iranian retaliation by duly commencing World War III. Meyrav Wurmser of the neoconservative Hudson institute averred that her husband David, Cheney’s former Middle East advisor, was spuriously misquoted by Newsweek and that the scheme was blown way out of proportion. Truth be told, she allowed, a minyon of Hasidic rabbis from Washington Heights were recruited to kidnap President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the Iranian leader’s speech at Columbia University. After bludgeoning Mr. Ahmadinejad around the head and torso with two kosher salamis and a stale bialy, they would take him, hooded and chained, to a CIA safe house on Long Island and ritualistically bathe (read: water board) him in an unsanitized Mikveh. From that point, she accedes, the details get rather murky.

Yet even after the diminished story broke, a spiral of escalation and accusation nonetheless flowed, no doubt warming the veep’s artificially paced heart. Two weeks ago Thursday, U.S. forces in northern Iraq detained Iranian national Mahmudi Farhadi, claiming him a central figure in Iran’s shipments of sophisticated weapons — “RPG-29s, explosively-formed penetrators (EFPs), 240 mm rockets and Misagh-1 surface-to-air missiles” — across the border. Yahya Rahim Safavi, an advisor to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, offered this bellicose retort: “We are closely watching the foreigners’ moves in neighboring countries by highly advanced satellite technology. Our missile industry is in very good shape. Americans should know that their 200,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are in Iran’s range.”

That Joan Rivers didn’t like his dress — “gauzy, confused, smelly” — doesn’t alter the fact that Osama Bin Laden’s latest Emmy-award winning video distinctly captures the zeitgeist that Islamic terrorists, given this latest sequence of events, might, were it not for Al Gore’s photographs of iceless polar caps, reign unchallenged as the reason not to get out of bed this year. Yet the red carpet is red for a reason. And that’s because the far more perilous and immediate threat to the commonweal is China.

The Chinese economy has been growing at 12% a year, mostly, it now seems, on the back of exporting industrial waste cleverly repackaged as deadly consumer products. And while the balance of trade is clearly tipping in their favor, they seem to harbor an inexplicable contempt for our children and pets. Earlier this year, you’ll recall, scores of American dog food brands were shelved after melamine and cyanuric acid (a chemical used in cleaning pools) were discovered in batches of wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate imported from China. According to veterinary scientists, use of such chemicals does make these ingredients appear to have a higher level of protein, although it is distinctly incompatible with Fido staying right side up.

Soon after the Michael Vickification of our canine population, waves of Chinese-made products began plaguing our kids. Millions of toys, books and coloring sets flooded our shores with toxic levels of lead paint, tarnishing in their wake such well-loved brands as Sponge Bob, Dora the Explorer and Thomas the Tank Engine. Other toys were suffused with super-strong magnets (like those comprising Stanford’s linear accelerator), which, if swallowed in pairs, could tear through a child’s intestines. And for those infants too young to succumb to such temptations, collapsing cribs provided ample treachery. A million Chinese-manufactured Simplicity and Graco units were recently recalled after several baby deaths. Yet despite overwhelming circumstantial evidence to the contrary, some pundits continue to insist that the Chinese are not compelled by hatred or ideology; rather they are driven purely by reckless profiteering, which makes them less like terrorists and more like, well, Republicans. Some exporters, surprisingly, have shown remorse. The owner of Lee Dur Industrial committed suicide soon after his tainted Sesame Street toys were pulled off the market. Cheung Shu-hung (whose last name, thankfully, wasn’t Nocuous-bowel-irrigation) hung himself in the company’s warehouse. “When I rushed there,” reported an employee, “the police had already sealed off the area. I saw that our boss had two deep marks in his neck.”

Rope burns aside, the communist government wasn’t about to rely on such altruism in the case of Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of the State Food and Drug Administration. Zheng was recently executed for taking bribes in exchange for approving six fake drugs, one of which killed at least 10 citizens. Meanwhile, our former FDA chief, Dr. Lester M. Crawford, got a measly three years probation after pleading guilty to conflict of interest and false writing charges for failing to disclose stock ownership of companies (e.g. Embrex, Sysco, Pepsi) subject to FDA regulation. I gather the court chose to overlook the pantheon of widely used killer drugs like Vioxx and Propulcid (or over-the–counter pediatric cough syrup) that stayed on the market far after the evidence beckoned for withdrawal. Or, perhaps, to ignore the cornucopia of potentially effective drugs that are for political reasons kept away from consumers.

The Plan B contraceptive is a case in point. Finally approved last year, the “morning after” pill was repeatedly corralled by Dr. David Hager, a Bush appointed member of the FDA Advisory Committee on Reproductive Health. Hager is an evangelical Christian and licensed gynecologist who authored several books (e.g. As Jesus Cared for Women) in which he railed against emergency contraception, abortion and premarital sex. He did, however, advocate “reading scripture [presumably Exodus 14:21 — parting of the red sea] to treat PMS.” He also advocated anally raping his wife. Linda Carruth Davis, his former wife of thirty-two years, suffered form narcolepsy and in the main was helpless against his prurient advances. But even were wifey awake, Hager would often “accidentally migrate” from vaginal to anal sex, citing an inability to “feel the difference.” (This is not, I would hazard, what you want to discover about your gynecologist as you’re “stirrups up” for a pap smear.) “I probably wouldn’t have objected so much or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal sex all the time,” she mused, “but it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [sodomy] that was so horrible.” Amen.

Answer me this: With the Beijing Olympics around the corner, why the fuck would the Chinese (the Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that 99% of illegal steroids are formulated with chemicals obtained from China) fortify our athletes with massive amounts of performance enhancing drugs? They have to know that after the Floyd Landis debacle, we Americans have learned, if nothing else, how to better mask our blood chemistry. And perhaps why we (again, still?) hate the French. Nonetheless, U.S. authorities last week busted up a rather expansive steroid production and distribution ring making over 120 arrests and seizing $6.5 million in cash along with the requisite weapons and “cooking utensils.” Police conducted similar raids in Denmark, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Sweden and Thailand. Chinese Gymnasts, therefore, need only consider the Russians and Guatemalans as serious impediments to a rigged medal count. I can only imagine what Dick Cheney might want to do about that.