In a Friday post, Esquire political blogger Charles Pierce stated that what scares him the most about the Dallas Ebola case is that decades of anti-Washington rhetoric from conservatives may have diminished the federal government’s ability to mount an effective domestic response to the disease in the event that it becomes “a crisis” rather than just “a problem.”
Pierce also blasted righty media for spreading anti-scientific “disinformation” about Ebola for political and financial gain and opined that conservatives who’ve done so are soulless, “evil,” and “too lazy to mug old ladies or swindle the blind.”
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
One of the…things that marked the early days of the AIDS epidemic was the truly wicked role played by various satraps of the Christian Right and by the nascent conservative media bubble machine. There was talk of God's vengeance upon gay people…
What we had in the AIDS epidemic was political opportunism married to what became obvious ignorance. What we are seeing now, promulgated by a conservative bubble machine that has built a self-sustaining universe around itself, is political opportunism married to an active campaign of disinformation. This is a terrible thing. The people making a profit out of it are people who are too lazy to mug old ladies or swindle the blind. The people making a profit out of it are people without consciences, people who are as free of patriotism as they are free of the inconveniences of having a soul…Every journalist who treats them as anything else, and every politician who treats them as anything else, are actively abetting evil.
Take, for example, Laura Ingraham, who…has begun to traffic in "alternative" theories about Ebola, treating a virus as though it were another vote to suppress or immigrant to bash, and lending her microphone to fringe nitwits because panic is profitable, and because almost everything, even a rare disease, is worth throwing at a president you don't like…
…You can't spread ignorance this way, because ignorance is more virulent than the virus is. You can't have your own science just because you have your own media, and you have your own history, and your own Constitution…
…This is a problem that may yet become a crisis, but hasn't yet, except for those people who seek to create a crisis so they can make a buck or win an election. If it does become an actual crisis, it is going to require a national response grounded in the best medical science we can find.
The country simply cannot go on this way, with one of our two political parties completely insane, and with a counter-cultural universe that claims the right to promulgate its own science as equal to the science produced by actual scientists…
And, most important of all, we are going to have to trust each other, and we are going to have to trust our government, which is the political manifestation of all of us, no matter what 30 years of Reaganite heresy has taught us. We are going to have to trust ourselves as individual citizens, and we are going to have to trust ourselves as partners in the creative act of self-government. I am afraid we will not, because there is one side of our politics who will stand in the way, and another side of our politics that is too frightened or too polite to call dangerous nonsense to account, and to shun the people who are promoting it. And that is what scares me the most about the man in Texas with the disease.
