Don't blame Susan Collins if you get the swine flu -- no matter what her lefty critics say.

The Republican senator from Maine made her support of President Barack Obama's stimulus bill contingent, in part, on stripping almost $900 million in pandemic flu preparation funds from the bill. Collins said that while the funding was important, it didn't belong in a bill targeted to economic recovery.

She and others were concerned about a potential pandemic, Collins said at the time. She should know: She's the ranking Republican on the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which oversees government programs on bioterrorism and other similar public health threats. "But does it belong in this bill?" she asked her colleagues. "Should we have $870 million in this bill? No, we should not."

The money got pulled.

And now that a Mexican swine flu outbreak has prompted a public health emergency declaration here in the United States, the liberal blogosphere, in its nastiest, I-told-you-so tones, is positively ripping with anti-Collins attacks. If you get sick, it's Collins' fault.

"Republicans Stripped Pandemic Flu Preparedness From Stimulus" is the banner over the Daily Kos' hit piece on Collins.

"Thanks for the swine flu," writes one critic on Daily Kos; "Thanks for weakening our nation. Thanks for exposing us to great harm," writes another.

"GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness," blares the Nation Magazine's headline on a column that declared Collins "dangerously short-sighted."

Columnist John Nichols just drips with irony when he magnanimously declares, "Did Rove, Collins and their compatriots want a pandemic? Of course not."

But thanks for asking the question, John.

Here's the problem with this line of attack: It's a cheap shot, and it's not the whole picture.

It presumes that all funding for fighting pandemics would come from the stimulus bill. That's not the case. While Collins helped nix the pandemic money in the stimulus, she had earlier joined a bipartisan group of senators in requesting $905 million for preparedness programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. That's on top of $7 billion appropriated since 2006 for such widespread health emergencies. An Associated Press report Tuesday quotes a White House spokesman as saying that current funding for anti-flu efforts was sufficient for now. And according to her office, Collins has voted in favor of billions of dollars in pandemic flu preparedness funding since 2005.

As for the whole picture, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. So if you want someone to blame for the swine flu, you can blame Democrats, too, not just Republicans. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer had no love for the pandemic funding, as he told the New York Post during the heated negotiations over the stimulus bill:

"[Schumer] said the compromise hammered out between Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans -- which has enough support to get it past any threat of a filibuster -- was far better than that passed by the House on Jan. 29.

" 'All those little porky things that the House put in, the money for the [National] Mall or the sexually transmitted diseases or the flu pandemic, they're all out,' Schumer said."

You just have to love the blogosphere. Whether they get it right or wrong, the partisan hacks are never in doubt.

Editorials represent the opinion of the Editorial Board of this newspaper: Publisher John Christie, Executive Editor Eric Conrad and Opinion Page Editor Naomi Schalit.