We have nothing to fear but Fox. Itself.

Amid the hoopla of the Obama inauguration (I can't be the only one out here who began to doubt the day would ever come), you may have noticed over the weekend a little international news story about a few dozen al Qaeda trainees in Algeria falling victim to the Black Death.

Yep... the Plague - the one that killed millions in two first-millennium waves of disasters several hundred years apart. The one that gave rats (and their disease-carrying fleas) a bad name... at least, one worse than they already had by living in sewers and scarfing up our garbage. And the one that wracks its victims with painful, swelling buboes and is becoming harder and harder to treat successfully because our antibiotics are becoming less and less effective against the ever-evolving bugs they battle.

Hearing of this outbreak at a remote al Qaeda training camp, you may have:

1.) - Wondered how it is that Algeria can host these terrorist bases and not end up on the Axis of Evil bulletin board.

2.) - Had a moment of schadenfreude that the al Qaeda faithful had been thinned by a count of 40 souls. After all, they don't like us - for any one of a number of (sometimes valid) reasons - and if worse came to worst, we could expect little aid and comfort at their hands.

So... leave it to Fox News to report - from anonymous sources, 'course - that the calamity was really a biochem warfare experiment gone awry. That's right: They were preparing some ugly bug to use against us, when it turned and bit them.

Not... really... terrible news, when you think about it. I lose little sleep over the misfortunes of those who seek to do me harm, and the terrible visions of Americans leaping to their deaths to avoid the conflagration that had engulfed the World Trade Center on 9/11 won't soon be placated.

Just seems a little odd that the story would appear on the very day of Obama's inauguration; a little bon mot from News Corp. to keep us ever-terrified, ever... pliable.

Now, sure, it may just be true: Those bastards may be fooling around with deadly germs as weapons - the way crazy Aum Shinrikyo cultists attacked with sarin nerve gas back in the mid-'90s. Remember that? For reasons completely their own, they gassed a Tokyo subway station to the tune of a dozen dead and hundreds affected.

And from "Mrs. Anthrax" to kiloton-savvy Dr. A.Q. Khan, this country allegedly has as much to fear from freedom-hating mad scientists as they do OBL, our cave-dwelling nemesis prowling Pakistan's lost tribal region. Somebody, somewhere is mixing up some killer germs or a bird-sh*t bomb in a rental truck to let us have it!

So, that case of Bubonic in North Africa couldn't have come from rodents or desert bats. Those Qaeda fighters died with their hands dirty, or Fox News has no credibility at all!