South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley
We continue now to assemble our list of 2014's most likely signs that the end of the world is nigh. In October, only one thing was nigh, and that was the upcoming elections. And that means it was time for our nation's regularly scheduled and heavily financed October freak-out. No, t'wasn't flag burners or feminists this time. This time it was Ebola. Ebola
was coming to
kill us all.
It's difficult to even winnow down the Ebola-related insanity enough to summarize it. October was the month we learned that Republicans liked—nay, demanded—administration "czars" after all. In past years the inclusion of "unelected czars" was a sign of a dictatorial administration running roughshod over our Freedoms; this year the absence of a czar was a sign Obama did not really care about Ebola after all. John McCain deserves a special callout here for being, and I choose the word carefully, a hack.
If you want a more overtly deranged theory of why Obama something-something Ebola, Keith Ablow can provide. If you want a more overtly racist version, go with Steve King. If you want to see stupid people supposing that Ebola was going to team up with ISIS and/or Hamas like the newest wetyerpants boy band, take your pick. If you want absolute proof that the entire Republican "panic" about Ebola was nothing but pandering bullshit, watch the party block the funding meant to combat Ebola even while campaigning on how it was going to kill us all.
If you're a Louie Gohmert fan—and you can't truly contemplate the downfall of civilization without giving America's Dumbest Congressman at least a bit part in that story—you might consider his suggestion that gay Americans shouldn't serve in the Army because they'd be too busy giving each other massages to defend themselves against attack.
That's tempting, but I have to give this one to South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. She wants you to know that flying a Confederate flag on the statehouse grounds is a non-issue because there's only one group of people that might possibly have an issue with it, and they don't, so there.
“What I can tell you is over the last three and a half years, I spent a lot of my days on the phone with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state,” the governor noted. “I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.”
A sign of the planet's imminent demise? Yep, I'm going with it.