The Obama administration's response to Ebola cases on American soil reminds Chris Matthews of the disastrous, apparently leaderless rollout of the bug-ridden ObamaCare federal website in 2013.
The host of MSNBC's Hardball made that complaint to the CDC's Dr. Anthony Fauci at the end of a segment on today's development that a Dallas, Texas, nurse has contracted Ebola:
My concern is this reminds me of the rollout for health care. The lack of a clear-cut personage that the president would say this person, man or woman, is in charge and when he was asked who was in charge of the rollout for health care, you know what happened? He said well, it's the person who's the COO of the CAA of the HHS. Somebody that he apparently never even met. I mean, that's a problem.But he knows you.
Earlier in the segment, Matthews offered to Fauci that the lack of a sitting U.S. Surgeon General may be to blame for the poor federal response, saying that Americans need a point man to go on TV and have the authority to calm everyone's nerves by speaking as the nation's top doc.
Matthews made sure to also chalk up the surgeon general vacancy to Senate Republicans and the NRA, as the gun-rights group opposes President Obama's surgeon general nominee, Dr. Vivek Murthy, for past statements he'd made suggesting he wants gun violence to be a considered a public health threat.
Sure, "it would be nice to have a surgeon general, but the problem right now, Chris, is not not having a surgeon general," Dr. Fauci told Matthews. "I think that's a little bit of a non sequitur. We're not in the situation we are right now because we don't have a surgeon general. That would be, really, making some majestic leaps."
True. But if Matthews's Hardball is known for anything, it's making "majestic leaps" of spittle-flecked speculation masquerading as gospel truth.
