Yes but that was so last June, before liberals grasped that concern about vaccinations could help fill the gaping void left by the war-on-women meme that had run its course and no longer drove their voters to the polls.
Thanks to dubious remarks about vaccines by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, two likely GOP candidates for president, left wingers are hopeful that they may concoct a serviceable new meme just in time for the 2016 campaign cycle.
It was back on June 2 that The Daily Show, first and last word in fake-but-real news for many liberals, ran a segment on vaccinations -- and the show left little doubt as to who was demonstrating "idiocy" on the subject.
"Measles, mumps, rubella -- oh they're in, baby," host Jon Stewart states to open the segment. "A blast from the past, they're back, which (pause) is terrible, I don't know why I was saying it so enthusiastically. But nearly as terrible, the reason these preventable diseases have returned, as Sam Bee reports."
Stewart passes to Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee, who prefaced her report by telling viewers that "conservatives are fighting the good fight against something they think threatens us all -- science," followed by a montage of audio clips from prominent conservatives to bolster the premise. "And this right-wing science denial has tragic, real-world consequences."
Prominent example, as cited by a source interviewed in the report, infectious disease expert Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center -- "The number of people who are choosing not to vaccinate their children is increasing. We've gone over the tipping point where you're starting to see vaccine preventable diseases coming back. Measles, mumps, whooping cough -- when you cross the line to being a scientific denialist, then you have the potential to do a lot of harm."
"Is it really fair to blame the other side, though" Bee asks in false seriousness. "I mean, every scientific fact has a counter fact that is true for other people."
Offit -- "Good news about vaccines? They're not a belief system. They're an evidence-based system."
Then came the mock moment of truth for Bee. Even though widespread use of vaccines had caused reported cases of measles, polio and rubella to plummet, "right-wing nutjobs" were causing new outbreaks of measles and mumps in the "red states" of California, New York and Oregon ... "wait, what the f*** is going on here?!"
Offit weighs in again -- "There are communities which have large populations of Caucasian, upper-middle class residents who are college-educated, often graduate school-educated, and believe simply by googling the term 'vaccine' on the Internet, they can know as much if not more than anyone who's giving them advice."
"It's happening in my community," Bee asks, doing her best to look shocked. "People who juice?"
"That's exactly where it's happening," Offit responds.
Bee's worldview has been seemingly upended. "Oh my God -- wealthy, white liberal enclaves are at risk. It's an outbreak of (bleep) misinformation. I had to find the source," followed by a trademark goofy Daily Show interview with "lifestyle blogger" Sarah Pope, who unapologetically defended her decision against vaccinating her children.
Now it was time for Bee to point the finger where she saw blame. "Progressives may love to (bleep) on climate-change denialists but terrifyingly, the anti-vaccination community displays the same symptoms. ... I had been looking for Patient Zero and I had found her (alluding to Pope). I had to trace the spread of this left-leaning idiocy. It starts on blogs like Pope's, goes viral on Twitter, and then replicates itself wherever progressives congregate. And then when it jumps hosts into a celebrity ... (cut to former Playmate model and future The View panelist Jenny McCarthy on CNN saying, "I believe vaccinations triggered Evan's autism") ... it goes airborne, putting millions at risk. You can catch it from an iPhone, over soy lattes, even at a toddler DJ class. I had to stop it!"
Bee ends the segment in a futile attempt to cordon off all the Starbucks shops in Manhattan with crime tape -- "Bad idea! A lot of Starbucks! ... Could nothing stop this?!"
Then back to Offit for his thoughts on ending the madness -- "I think, sadly, the only way that this gets better is when we start to see more and more outbreaks."
Which we're seeing now -- with much of the media predictably citing remarks by Chris Christie and Rand Paul as irrefutable evidence that conservatives are to blame for the resurgence of these diseases. Unfortunately for the left, there's abundance evidence in the media record, from The Daily Show, Jenny McCarthy's crusade against vaccines, a since-retracted 2005 Rolling Stone cover story by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and remarks by candidates Obama and Clinton during the 2008 campaign, to show that anxiety over vaccinations has hardly been confined to conservatives.
