In the past week, The New York Times has ridiculed Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Chris Christie for having "fed panic" by ordering quarantines for health workers arriving from Ebola-plagued countries.
NBC News' Brian Williams opened his broadcast last Friday announcing that the Obama administration was trying "to restrain the Ebola panic."
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow complained that the "hysteria" over Ebola was getting "stupider."
I haven't noticed any panic. If you want panic, review media coverage of the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. That hair-on-fire coverage was based entirely, it turns out, on the media's gullibly swallowing inaccurate accounts of the incident.
For decades liberals have terrified soccer moms about a slew of imaginary terrors: global warming, Alar on apples, breast implants, heterosexual AIDS, nuclear war, and Republicans taking away their birth control.
Nannies rushed to grade schools to yank apples out of little children's hands, elderly married couples got tested for AIDS, and students at Ivy League colleges demanded that their health departments stock cyanide pills in case of nuclear attack. (Because the Russkies were definitely hitting Ithaca, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island, first.)
And then, except for a few heterosexual AIDS victims -- who also happened to be intravenous drug users -- no American ever died from a single one of these liberal-hyped dangers. I do not recall, for example, ever hearing of a nurse acquiring AIDS from treating an AIDS patient, certainly not a nurse wearing a spacesuit, as the Ebola-infected nurses were.
Within the past few years, Rachel Maddow has been panicked about (among many, many other things):
-- Right-wing hillbillies murdering census workers (the census worker committed suicide in an attempted insurance fraud);
-- Republican budget cuts killing us when bridges collapse (the Minnesota bridge collapsed because of a design flaw, not budget cuts);
-- Gun rights supporters plotting another Oklahoma City bombing (they had assembled on April 19, the anniversary of the bombing -- which also happens to be the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord).
But now, the political party that specializes in hysteria has suddenly become too-cool-for-school about a deadly disease being brought to our country for no reason. Oh, you big pussy, you won't get Ebola.
Let the record reflect, Democrats now oppose "the politics of fear" -- as NBC's Chuck Todd dubbed concerns about Ebola.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire accused her Republican opponent, Scott Brown, of "fear-mongering" about Ebola, but she sure didn't mind fear-mongering on health care. In order to pass the widely unpopular Obamacare, Shaheen carried on about insurance companies' obscene profits and hectored, "We cannot wait!"
The New York Daily News' Denis Hamill wrote five hysterical columns on Ferguson. One was titled, "Is this Selma in 1965?" But when it comes to a disease that kills more than half of the people it infects, he says, "Take a chill pill."
How about telling the deranged protesters in Ferguson to "take a chill pill"?
After years of Republican candidates having to assure voters that it would require several million policemen to take away every woman's birth control kit -- but that was an excellent question! -- it's too much to have to listen to liberals scoff at a disease with a 70 percent fatality rate.
Ebola is a lot more dangerous than any of the fears whipped up by liberals. Peter Piot, the Flemish scientist who discovered Ebola in 1976, recently told the British Guardian:
"I always thought that Ebola, in comparison to AIDS or malaria, didn't present much of a problem because the outbreaks were always brief and local. Around June it became clear to me that there was something fundamentally different about this outbreak. ... We Flemish tend to be rather unemotional, but it was at that point that I began to get really worried."
A few days ago, Piot described the screening being done at arrival airports as "not that effective, to be honest," adding, "The most cost-effective method is to screen people before they take the plane."
(Speaking of which, where did the CDC's Tom Frieden go? Does he have Ebola?)
It's beyond idiotic for the media to keep condescendingly instructing Americans that they are more likely to die in a car accident, from food poisoning, skin cancer or heart disease, than from Ebola.
We know that. We have rationally accepted the tradeoffs in order to get places quickly, dine in restaurants, walk on the beach and eat steak. Those are risks prudently taken in exchange for something we deem more valuable.
What's the upside of bringing Ebola here? And why on earth is the Obama administration preparing to import non-citizen Ebolees? It's perfectly logical for Americans to ask, "What are we getting out of this?" But the only answer they get is: We can't build a fence around the country!
We're not seeing "panic." What we're seeing is rage that the country is having a deadly disease foist on it for no good reason.
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