For a full month now, the corporate media has been engaged in a campaign of fear mongering to gin up hysteria over Ebola. It has been the most shameless example of reckless and irresponsible journalism that I have seen regarding a disease since the early days of the AIDS scare. Steven Petrow, who reported on the AIDS epidemic for two decades, had a great piece about this at the Washington Post. Why ‘Fearbola’ reminds me of the early AIDS panic.
Exactly one person has died of Ebola in America. Thomas Eric Duncan would not have died if he was not: (1) African, (2) without health insurance, (3) without financial means to pay for medical care, and (4) in the worst place for a poor black man without health insurance to get sick in America, an emergency room in the state of Texas. Ebola didn’t have to kill my uncle, Thomas Eric Duncan.
The death of Thomas Eric Duncan was fortuitous timing for the GOP, because it dovetailed nicely into their biennial campaign of fear mongering to scare the crap out of low information voters to get them to vote Republican, the only thing that the GOP knows how to do well.
I swear GOP voters are a bunch of hysterical bedwetters pissing themselves out of irrational fear over imaginary monsters hiding under their beds. This constant state of irrational fear makes them susceptible to believing every wild-ass conspiracy theory generated by the conservative media entertainment complex on a daily basis . . . like Arizona’s angry old man, John McCain.
Charles Pierce of Esquire writes, Here’s Some Stupid For Lunch:
We can now add “public health emergencies” to the endless list of important things about which John McCain will run his yap despite knowing less than dick. He was up around here this weekend, campaigning in New Hampshire for Scott Brown, which would have been a meeting of the minds, had they not been two short. McCain was asked about the Ebola business and, naturally, he called for hearings because if John McCain isn’t on television not knowing dick about stuff every two days, he gets the bends.
“What we need to do is – anyone who wants to get on a plane and come to the United States of America should go into quarantine for 21 days, take a blood test and then come to the United States,” McCain said. “We shouldn’t wait until they get here after they may have contaminated innumerable people. … This has been a terrible fumbling again by this administration.” McCain also wants the administration to explain why troops were sent to the Ebola zone without congressional approval. “I want to have hearings as soon as we get back as to whether our military personnel should go there,” McCain said. “He didn’t ask permission of Congress.”
If you don’t have the disease, you should stay where the disease is killing thousands of people for an extra three weeks, rather than coming here, where one person has died. And we should have some hearings on why the president insists on acting like a president despite the fact that he still does not have John McCain’s permission to do so.
When are the media villagers going to have enough of this tiresome act by John McCain? When are the voters of Arizona finally going to tell this old fool it’s time for you to go?
And every time this embarrassment of a senator opens his mouth, I thank my luck stars that we dodged THAT bullet! Seriously, he knows nothing about anything. Time to retire, John!