What’s all this I hear about that silly bad flu bug?
by digby
My piece in Salon this morning takes a look at the fear scale — and wonders why the right wing is hysterical over ISIS and thinks the president is wasting time and money trying to stop Ebola:
It certainly seems as though there have been a lot of fearful events over this long hot summer of 2014. Yahoos with too much firepower are blowing airliners out of the sky, terrorists are videotaping themselves beheading journalists, and police are shooting unarmed kids down in the streets of America, just to name a few incidents of the past few months. But it’s hard to imagine anything more scary than a rapidly mutating contagious killer disease pandemic that features all the worst symptoms of the flu until it culminates in bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and rectum, the eyes swell shut, your genitals swell up, all of your skin hurts and you have a blood-filled rash all over your body. And then you die. In the panoply of things to be afraid of you’d think everyone could acknowledge that this is the big one.
Here’s just one of the idiotic rightwing pundits:
“I’m just getting very confused about the nature of this enemy. Is it those scary little worms that Drudge always has on the Drudge Report? The scary little Ebola worms? Is that the real threat to national security?”
That’s Laura Ingraham. The Ivy Leaguer.
I didn’t mention in the piece that there is one right wing pundit who seems to get why the president might be a tad concerned aboutthis disease. He happens to have gone to medical school:
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, I applaud what the president is doing. This is America at its best. Our armed forces are essentially the biggest NGO on the planet for helping people, the way we did in the tsunami, the way we do in Haiti. It is organized to go and to establish institutions and structures, and that’s what it’s going to do.
Now, the reason that we are doing this is, a, this could destroy West Africa. In other words, it could destroy all of the existing social structures rapidly, because it’s now in urban areas, which has never happened with Ebola.
The other thing, which is unstated because you don’t want to start a panic, is that it is possible, extremely unlikely, but possible that the virus mutates and becomes more easy to transmit, perhaps even by respiratory means. If it does, it becomes like the flu of 1918. So it’s because of that remote possibility, which we don’t even speak about because it is sort of impossible to imagine, that we want to make sure that it stays in West Africa, and deploying the military and all of our resources is a good thing to do. It’s humanitarian and it’s protective.
But hey it’s nothing to the imminent threat of ISIS Ninjas sneaking across the border and killing us all in our beds. So, let’s be sure to keep our priorities straight.
.