(And no, that title is not a typo - Morans! - it's just really seems like American media has completely totally lost their cotton-picking minds over this entire Ebola "crisis" in which we've had a total of five confirmed infections - so far - and one death.
This isn't to say Ebola isn't serious, but outside of a literal handful of cases, it's not a serious problem in the U.S. Not yet. But that's not the impression you get when you look at the way the news media has been covering this.
It occurs to me that this frenzied, panicked and frankly hysterically paranoid and cowardly response to the Ebola threat isn't really all that new. This is how the media, and certain members of the public, responded to "Deadly Muslims" after 9-11, how they responded to the suggestion that Saddam Hussein was just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from giving brand new fresh nukes and anthrax to al Qeada and the only way to stop them was to commit the human atrocity and war crime of
torture - and invade the wrong flipping country, and call anyone who pointed out their frack-up "Traitors" and "America Haters", how they respond to anyone who doesn't accept
their personal Jesus into ones life, bedroom and vagina, how people have responded to Obamacare and it's phantom "Death Panels", how they've responded to Benghazi, the IRS scrutiny kerfuffle, to the Private Bergdahl trade, how they've responded to the threat of ISIL and to just about any random black guy with a toy gun, or a decorative sword, or no gun and his hands up, or basically still breathing.
When you realize that over 20,000 people die from the regular every-day flu every year world-wide and no one freaks out about it - it begins to put all of this in some perspective.
This panic isn't a bug in the system, it's a central feature of how America "works" - or rather doesn't - these days.
Here's just a quick summary of some of the Ebola stories that have occurred in the last week.
When the first American Ebola patient, Dr. Kent Conrad's condition was downgraded to stable, Ann Coulter hit the roof.
In the column, titled “Ebola Doc’s Condition Downgraded To ‘Idiotic,’” Coulter called Dr. Kent Brantly’s humanitarian work in Liberia nothing more than the efforts of an ego-driven Christian and “the first real-world demonstration of the economics of Obamacare.”
She called the work he did in Africa incomparable to the amount of money spent by Christian charities that paid to fly him home. Coulter also questioned why the doctor had to go to Africa in the first place when he could have just served his faith in the U.S.
Yes why-oh-why did a Doctor have to travel all the way to Africa, in order to implement not just profession - to heal the sick where they actually are, rather than in Shebogan - but also carry out one of Jesus primary missions which was...
to heal the sick?
But oh wait, she went on, and on...
“About 15,000 people are murdered in the U.S. every year. More than 38,000 die of drug overdoses, half of them from prescription drugs. More than 40 percent of babies are born out of wedlock,” Coulter wrote. “So no, there's nothing for a Christian to do here.”
And clearly we don't have enough Doctors jumping in front of those bullets and taking those prescription drugs, and having those OD's themselves in America. Because Americans should only give a shit about Americans.
Coulter was also against providing "Free Medical Coverage" for Ebola victims.
"It's becoming increasingly clear this is just another platform for Obama to demonstrate that we are citizens of the world," she wrote. "The entire Ebola issue is being discussed — by our government, not the United Nations — as if Liberians are indistinguishable from Americans, and U.S. taxpayers should be willing to pay whatever it takes to save them."
Of course when you just let a virus spread, it tends to - uh -
spread, and the next thing you know we aren't talking about how much free health care Liberians should get, we're talking about how much healthcare we need to give
Texans who have come down with the virus, particularly when failing to diagnose and treat them puts the rest of us at risk.
Erick Erickson responds to CDC claims that they could have done much more about Ebola by now if Congress hadn't been slashing their budget with "Fed Gave Ebola Dollars to Fat Lesbians"
"For example, instead of studying Ebola, the National Institutes of Health were studying the propensity of lesbians to be fat," Erickson wrote Monday on his blog, providing a link to a study on the link between sexual orientation and obesity.
There simply are no words.
Louie Gohmert, who can always be counted on for the rational reasoned response to any situation said that the two Dallas nurses who become infected with the virus were part of the "Democrat War on Women".
Uh huh. Yeah. Really.
“You know, it’s a shame that the CDC head, Frieden, is apparently the commander of the Democrats’ new war on women nurses,” Gohmert opined. “Because, goodnight, they set them up, and then they throw them under the bus.”
“The idiot comes out and says that clearly she had violated protocol,” the Texas congressman continued. “At least in football, they have to tell you what you violated.”
I think the fact that so many Doctors and Nurses
haven't contracted the virus when following the proper protocols, particularly in Liberia and other parts of the world where over 4,000 people have died of Ebola, is pretty much telling us something didn't go right. They haven't said what it was because they don't know - yet. But they will.
Also the Dallas Hospital has now admitted they messed up, because they did.
And then you had Gretchen Carlson who managed to wrap the IRS, Secret Service, VA and Obamacare along with all this Ebola panic into a beautiful anti-Government bouillabaisse.
Time now for my take. So, should we trust the government to keep us all safe from Ebola? With the government's recent track record not being so hot, well, we learned we couldn't trust the IRS, after the targeting of conservative groups. The Secret Service, after an armed man made his way into the White House. The VA, after reports men and women who served this country died waiting to get health care. We couldn't trust the promise that Obamacare that we could keep our doctors that we wanted. And do we trust that we know all the answers yet about Benghazi? What more and more people seem to be asking about Ebola now isn't that they're necessarily scared about actually getting the disease, but that they're scared the government agencies responsible with helping us if we do get sick might not be up to the task. So if Ebola becomes a bigger issue the question still remains, will we be safe?
And there's "Dr." Keith Ablow proclaiming that Obama is allowing Ebola to come to America because of his
"affliction/affection" for Africa.
Gibson wondered “what would be the harm” in stopping air traffic from the three African countries that were most effected by Ebola.
Ablow said that he knew why Obama wouldn’t do it: “His affinity, his affiliations are with them! Not us! That’s what people seem unwilling to accept. He’s their leader. We don’t have a president.”
“We don’t have a president?” Gibson asked.
“We don’t have a president who has the American people as his primary interest, who believes the country has Manifest Destiny and has been a force for good,” Ablow insisted.
Or perhaps the President trusts the experts, like the head of the CDC who opposes such a ban because he says it would
cause more problems than it would solve.
When a wildfire breaks out we don't fence it off. We go in to extinguish it before one of the random sparks sets off another outbreak somewhere else.
We don't want to isolate parts of the world, or people who aren't sick, because that's going to drive patients with Ebola underground, making it infinitely more difficult to address the outbreak.
It could even cause these countries to stop working with the international community as they refuse to report cases because they fear the consequences of a border closing.
And it's not just media figures who've let this all get out of hand. A Pennsylvania teen from West Africa received
Ebola Taunts from his Soccer Team opponents.
A 3-time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer was disinvited from a Syracuse Conference once they learned he'd been covering the outbreak in Liberia.
So average people are acting out, and harassing innocent people if they think they can find any possible connection between them and the Liberia.
But the thing is all of this panic is unnecessary as people who are actually familiar with the diseased explained to Fox News that it's very unlikely that anyone who traveled in a plane with one of the two nurses from Dallas who've shown signs of the virus are unlikely to contract it also.
"Well, if I were on the flight I really wouldn't be worried," Schaffner, the chairman of Vanderbilt University's Department of Preventive Medicine, explained.
"She was not symptomatic and no one had contact with her blood or body fluids. They're going to find out that all of those folks are just fine," the doctor continued. "They're going to treat their anxiety. They will follow them carefully and monitor them. But they're going to be alright."
"Well, that's good news," Scott said, sounding unconvinced. "But there have been so many, you know, holes in this whole Ebola story. You know, just the fact that this [deceased Ebola victim] Thomas Duncan was able to apparently lie to immigration officials, say that he hadn't been around any Ebola victims when in fact he had, then he brings it to this country, then a couple of nurses get sick, people who are supposed to be, you know, taking all the precautions. It just raises a lot of unease."
...
"Actually, the community aspect of this Ebola response has been done by the book," Schaffner said. "All the individuals who had contact with Mr. Duncan ... are doing well. They continue to be monitored and they're now close to the end of their monitoring period. That ought to give us a great deal of comfort."
In order to get Ebola you have to come into contact with bodily fluids from someone who is symptomatic at that time. This nurse wasn't, and that's very likely why the CDC okay'd her to travel, she didn't - at that time - present any known risk.
The larger question in all of this panic, particularly what many conservatives from Carlson to Donald Trump have said about not being able to trust the government to do this... who or what exactly would be their alternative?
Are they suggesting that a private agency or company should be granted the authority and resources to implement travel bans? To require health protocols such as asking people traveling from countries with the outbreak to have their temperatures taken? Are they suggesting the private companies, such as Johnson & Johnson that distributed tainted Tylenol, or Merck that caused hundreds of thousands of people's deaths with their drug Vioxx, or GM with their faulty ignition switches, and Toyota with their stuck accelerator peddles, or the companies that distributed Thalidomide which caused birth defects, or the Texas fertilizer plant that exploded, or Duke Energy that let tons of coal ash contaminate the Roanoke River... exactly which private company, if any, has the expertise and track record to do this job?
The fact is that there are some things the government does, because no one else can. Private industry has it's role, so does Government. Neither is perfect. Simply because either one may make an occasional mistake or even a catastrophic failure doesn't mean that they can't learn and improve from that experience if they're willing to make the necessary changes.
The point is that we should expect and demand better, from both industry and from government. But these people who are currently freaking out and bed wetting over this "crisis", and the last crisis, and the next crisis, are the Last People We Should Listen to on any of those subjects.
They simply don't know what they're talklng about.
Which is all the more reason why people shouldn't vote for them either. People who don't know what they're saying, certainly don't know how to govern.
Vyan