“An Airhead And A Moron”: Stay Calm, Carry On, And Don’t Listen To Peter King
With a confirmed case of Ebola in New York City, the relevant officials and agencies, who have prepared extensively for these circumstances, are doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. Some anxiety is understandable, but the public can have confidence in the public-health system.
And while they’re at it, Americans should probably ignore a certain Republican congressman from NYC.
Republican Rep. Peter King thinks the doctors are wrong on Ebola, suggesting the deadly virus might have mutated and gone airborne in an interview with Long Island News Radio last week.
“You know my attitude was it’s important not to create a panic and it’s important not to overreact and the doctors were absolutely certain that this cannot be transmitted and it was not airborne and yet we find out the people who have contracted it were wearing all protective gear,” said King.
The Republican lawmaker, who made the comments before learning about the new diagnosis, added, “I think the doctors have been wrong. I don’t think it was any conspiracy, I think they have been wrong…. It’s time for the doctor’s to realize that they were wrong and figure out why they were wrong. Maybe this is a mutated form of the virus.”
To understate matters, King isn’t helping. First, it’s true that some nurses in Dallas became infected while caring for a patient, but the CDC has concluded that a breach in protocol with the protective gear was responsible. This does not mean Ebola is “airborne.”
Second, while it’s possible for medical professionals to be wrong, there’s no evidence whatsoever – from King or anyone else – that the doctors have been wrong about Ebola.
The congressman, in other words, is just throwing around reckless opinions, based on nothing but fear, and making bogus assertions that may scare people for no reason. It’s the exact opposite of what responsible public figures, communicating with the public, should be doing right now. Peter King has no background in science or medicine, and there’s simply no reason for him to tell Americans that doctors “were wrong” about Ebola when the evidence suggests the exact opposite is true.
In case that weren’t quite enough, King also wants the government to start aggressively spying on Americans based on their religion.
Republican Rep. Peter King says the United States should respond to the shootings Wednesday morning in and around the Canadian Parliament, which left a soldier dead, by increasing surveillance on Muslims.
The New York Republican, speaking with NewsMaxTV’s America’s Forum also placed blame on “morons” on the New York Times editorial board, Associated Press, and American Civil Liberties Union for limiting the New York Police Department’s ability to surveil Muslim communities.
“We can have all the technology in the world, the fact is we have to find out what’s happening on the ground in these Muslim communities and we can only do that through increased surveillance,” King said.
Taking a step back, so long as folks keep a level head, follow guidance from knowledgeable officials, and ignore Peter King, we should be all right.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 24, 2014
“Fear Mongering, Because It’s All They Have Left”: The GOP Is Desperate To Win The Mid-Term Elections
They supported the sequester which cut funding research for the Center For Disease Control. Maybe we could have been closer to a cure for a certain virus. They refused to hold confirmation hearings for President Obama’s choice for Surgeon General because they don’t like the nominee, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy (big surprise! Could the NRA’s objection have something to do with it?) Gee, we could have used one right about now. They decided to not come back from their fall break (after a long summer vacation) to vote on going to war against ISIS and instead are campaigning for the mid-term elections.
And now certain members of the Republican party are running election ads attacking the President and Democrats for not doing more to stop both the Ebola virus and ISIS. To me, this is the height of hypocrisy.
One GOP campaigner, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) even went so far as to lie on Fox News and say at least 10 Islamist State fighters were captured at the southern border. This, after others concocted a false scheme where they say immigrant children were entering the country with the Ebola virus.
Either the GOP is very clever, playing on the fears of US citizens or they are desperate to win the mid-terms. But the truth is the President has shown leadership and taken bold action on both issues. He sent troops and medical aids and supplies to the Ebola afflicted African nations. He has appointed an Ebola Czar, Ron Klain, a veteran DC insider with experience in navigating the government bureaucracy and after calling on the President to appoint such a position, of course, the GOP are condemning his choice because they say he has no medical background.
My understanding is that this appointee will not be actually doctoring or healing those with the disease but coordinating and overseeing an effort to find a cure and assist health care workers and hospitals and tracking down those exposed to the virus.
The President and Secretary of State John Kerry have assembled an impressive coalition of many nations including Arab ones to help fight ISIS. Our bombing of ISIS headquarters in Syria and Iraq and most recently the Syrian Kurdish border city of Kobane have ISIS on the run. President Obama has said it will be a long fight but we must prevail.
The ironic thing is that even though Republican lawmakers support the President’s actions against ISIS, many have blamed him for their emergence and have constantly called him weak on foreign policy issues. I remember a time when it would have been deemed treasonous to not back our Commander in Chief in times of war.
Instead of constantly condemning, I would like to know what the GOP plans to do. Besides a travel ban which many experts believe would hamper efforts to contain the virus where it started, I have seen no solutions from Republicans to either of these crises.
I notice we hear little these days about Obamacare which was supposed to be the defining issue of these mid-terms. I guess that means those people who have it like it (and can keep it). My question is why don’t the Democrats turn it into an election year plus and call out the naysayers? Is it because it is too closely tied to the President? The GOP may be fear mongerers but the Dems are cowards.
It seems to me those seeking election should campaign positively and tell what they have done and will do for the American public rather than running away from the tough issues or blaming the other side for all the ills in the world. No wonder Congress has an approval rating of 16 percent. They talk about the President’s being low at 40 percent but he’s 24 percent higher than they are.
I get it. The campaign tactic is to deflect from the good economic news and the growing support for Obamacare. But I am hoping the electorate will reject the fear mongering and the voter suppression and the cowardly avoiding of the hot button issues and do research and vote for those who run clean campaigns and have proven themselves good public servants. There must be a handful of them out there. The only way to exact change is to throw out those who have no solutions but constantly complain. Negativity is not what we need right now, rather it is a coming together of hearts and minds to solve our problems in a constructive way regardless of party.
By: Joan E. Dowlin, The Huffington Post Blog, October 21, 2014
“Cut, Cut, And Cut Some More”: Republican’s ‘Blame Ebola On Obama’ Ploy Backfires
The instant the Ebola crisis hit American shores, the inevitable happened. The GOP blamed President Obama for it. First, it was the lame brained borderline racist charge that Obama either deliberately or through sheer incompetence did nothing to seal the borders to keep the virus at bay. The only slightly more intelligible attack was that Obama did nothing to command the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to take panic measures to insure no incidence of the disease would turn up in the country. Then the GOP campaign strategists stepped in and had some of its top candidates suddenly parroting the kooky line that Obama was to blame for a supposedly porous and negligent CDC and border security lapse. Obama’s appointment of an “Ebola Czar” provided even more grist for the GOP hit mill on Obama. It was variously blown off as too little, too late or ridiculed as a desperate appointment of a supposedly medically unqualified political crony.
This is political gamesmanship of the lowest order, playing on media and public fears over a legitimate and terrifying health crisis, to again belittle Obama. And with the stakes sky high in the 2014 midterm elections, the dirty political pool by the GOP was totally predictable.
But the twist in the Ebola saga is that the dirty hit job has backfired. The attack opened the GOP wide open to media and public scrutiny of the galling fact that the GOP has systematically whittled away vital funding for dozens of health programs since 2010. The CDC, much the whipping agency for the supposed Obama health dereliction, was stripped of nearly $600 million; millions that could have gone to ramp up monitoring, screening, and education programs, as well as research on vaccines to deal with infectious and communicable diseases. The names of the more than two dozen Republicans who poleaxed the CDC budget have been published. And to no surprise the bulk of them are either directly affiliated with or have been in part bankrolled by tea party factions. In September, there were initial reports that House Republicans would cut almost half of the nearly $100 million that the White House wanted earmarked to fight Ebola. It didn’t happen not because of any sudden epiphany by the GOP House members to provide all the funding that the White House asked for the program, but because word had quickly leaked out about the defunding possibility, and that would have been a PR nightmare that even the most rabid anti-Obama House Republicans knew was fraught with deep peril.
GOP leaders have hit back hard on the charge that they are somehow to blame for any laxity in the fight against Ebola by claiming that Obama and the Democrats have also made cuts in the NIH budget and that those cuts are the reason for any shortfall in the CDC’s funding for programs. That’s true as far as it goes. But what the GOP conveniently omits is that the cuts to the NIH budget and indeed all other health and education and domestic spending program cuts were agreed to by Obama with the GOP jamming a virtual political gun to his head demanding he sign off on cuts as the draconian price for ending gridlock over the deficit war.
Now in the backdrop of a potential catastrophic health nightmare, the cuts have suddenly become as big a political campaign tug of war as the blame game about Ebola. But it’s one that the GOP can’t win. Because it, not Obama and the Democrats, have been firmly identified in the public eye as the ones that have consistently sledge hammered the Obama administration and Congress to cut, cut, and cut some more spending. No matter how much the right wing gnashes its teeth, shouts and moans and attempts to turn the table and finger-point Obama for the funding fall off in the Ebola fight, it won’t change that naked reality. The hit ads that Democrats took out lambasting the GOP for the funding cuts are believable not because of any numbers accuracy or inaccuracy but in part because of public belief that when it comes to pound saving, the GOP will go to any length to save a dollar at the expense of vital programs.
The ads are believable in greater part because the GOP has left no stone unturned in its ruthless and relentless drive to use any and every crisis real or manufactured to paint Obama as a weak, ineffectual and failed president and presidency. It has banked on, and stoked, the frozen political divide in the country knowing that a wide segment of the public has open, unabashed contempt for his policies and his administration. The GOP banks that it can swivel this divisiveness into sustained opposition to those policies, and that it can further boost its numbers in the House and especially the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections. The ultimate aim is to translate the incessant hit attacks on Obama into a White House win in 2016.
The Ebola scare gave the GOP another seemingly readymade opportunity to blame Obama for yet another crisis. But this time the signs are good that the ploy has backfired.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Huffington Post Blog, October 18, 2014
“Rand Paul’s Recklessness Spins Out Of Control”: To Assume Paul Has More Credibility Than Legitimate Medical Experts Is A Mistake
A couple of weeks ago, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) started making appearances on far-right radio, questioning Ebola assessments from the actual experts, blaming “political correctness,” and raising threats that seemed plainly at odds with the facts.
Soon after, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directs the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Institutes at NIH, appeared on CBS and was presented with the Republican senator’s assessment. “I don’t think that there’s data to tell us that that’s a correct statement, with all due respect,” the doctor said.
At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, it’s no longer clear just how much respect Rand Paul is due. My msnbc colleague Benjy Sarlin reported yesterday from New Hampshire, where the senator appeared eager to move the public conversation backwards.
Rand Paul had a message for students at Plymouth State University who had gathered for a pizza party with the Kentucky senator on Thursday: Ebola is coming for us all and the government is hiding the truth about the deadly disease. […]
“This thing is incredibly contagious,” Paul said. “People are getting it, fully gowned, masked, and must be getting a very tiny inoculum and they’re still getting it. And then you lose more confidence because they’re telling you stuff that may not be exactly valid and they’re downplaying it so much that it doesn’t appear that they’re really being honest about it.”
On CNN, Paul added, “If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party they’re contagious and you can catch it from them. [The administration] should be honest about that…. You start to wonder about a basic level of competence.”
Yes, if there’s one person who has standing to whine about “a basic level of competence,” it’s the often confused junior senator from Kentucky – the one who’s deliberately contradicting medical experts, confusing the public at a difficult time.
To reiterate a point from our previous coverage, because Rand Paul has a medical background, some may be more inclined to take his concerns seriously on matters of science and public health.
With this in mind, let’s not forget that the senator, prior to starting a career in public office four years ago, was a self-accredited ophthalmologist before making the leap to Capitol Hill.
To assume Paul knows what he’s talking about, and that he has more credibility that legitimate medical experts, is a mistake.
Stepping back, though, there’s a larger context to consider, especially as the senator prepares for a national campaign. When the pressure is high and conditions get tense, the public can learn a lot about a potential leader. Do they maintain grace under fire or do they start to crack? Can they remain calm and responsible in the face of fear or do they run wild-eyed in misguided directions? Do they maintain their composure and keep a level head or do they encourage panic and anxiety?
The past couple of weeks have told us something important about Rand Paul, but none of what we’re learning casts the senator in a positive light.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 17, 2014
“Despite The Non-Stop Coverage”: Surprise; Americans Are Confident In Government’s Ability To Handle Ebola
This morning the White House announced that Ron Klain, who was formerly the chief of staff to Vice President Biden, will coordinate the government’s response to Ebola. Klain will be the “czar” Republicans were asking for, I suppose because they had to demand the administration do something it wasn’t yet doing (thus is the nature of opposition). Which seems like a perfectly reasonable idea — you can never have too much coordination, and Klain is generally respected for his organizational skills.
But as much as Republicans have been arguing that everything is spinning out of control and the government isn’t protecting us from a deadly disease that might just bring about a zombie apocalypse, it turns out that the public isn’t going quite as crazy as you might think.
Don’t get me wrong — there are plenty of people who are reacting irrationally to a disease that has so far infected a grand total of two people in this nation of 316 million, both of whom were health care workers treating a man dying of Ebola (if that doesn’t describe you, you’re safe). But the growing number of Ebola polls shows that the public actually has a pretty good amount of confidence that the government can handle this.
That’s not what you might think if you tuned into the panic-a-thon that is cable news, or even much other news. Every evening news show is leading with Ebola every night, and every newspaper has multiple stories every day about the disease. There’s a danger that we could create a self-fulfilling prophecy, one in which the public is portrayed as losing their collective minds, which makes it more likely that they will end up doing so.
But let’s look at what they’re actually saying. It turns out that on some questions, partisanship has a big impact, which is actually encouraging in a way. It tells us that Ebola is much like other issues, where politics provides the filter through which things are being viewed. Whether it’s the economy or health reform or national security, Republicans are always going to be less likely to express confidence in the ability of a government run by Democrats to do anything right (and vice-versa).
So, via Eric Boehlert, in the latest Washington Post poll, 62 percent of respondents said they were very confident or somewhat confident in the government’s ability to respond to an Ebola outbreak. Among Democrats, the number was 76 percent, while among Republicans it was a still-healthy 54 percent. A Pew Research Center poll taken two weeks ago found something similar: 69 percent of Democrats said they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the government’s ability to handle Ebola, while 48 percent of Republicans agreed. Pew pointed out that in 2005, when George W. Bush was president, the same question was asked about bird flu and the numbers were reversed (with Democrats then expressing even less confidence than Republicans do now).
That tells a story not of widespread public hysteria but of rather ordinary partisanship. And a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll also shows a more reasonable public than you might expect if you were just watching the panic-a-thon on cable news. Among the questions Kaiser asked was this:
Which do you think is more likely: Ebola will spread and there will be a widespread outbreak in the U.S.; or Ebola will be contained to a small number of cases in the U.S.?
Ebola will be contained: 73
There will be a widespread outbreak: 22
And people in both parties expressed confidence in the Centers for Disease Control, with 79 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans saying they’d have confidence in the CDC to contain the disease and prevent if from spreading if there were a case of Ebola in their area.
As a news story, Ebola lends itself perfectly to sensationalistic, ratings-grabbing news. It’s mysterious, threatening, dramatic, and carries the theoretical potential for global disaster. But so far, despite the non-stop coverage and Republicans’ insistence that chaos reigns, most of the public seems to think that our government is capable of handling it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 17, 2014
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