The national nervousness regarding the Ebola virus seems to have gone up another notch with the latest case, but rest assured that the leading experts are all hard at work to limit the potential political consequences.
At first glance the disease’s introduction to the United States would seem a problem for the Democrats, who for multi-cultural rather than medical reasons have resisted a ban on travel from the countries where the Ebola virus has become epidemic. This and other missteps also undermine the Democrats’ argument on behalf of letting government handle every aspect of American life, bolster the Republicans’ argument that the government is a gargantuan fool, and distracts attention from free contraception and the recent availability part-time jobs and anything else the Democrats might prefer to talk about. Despite these obvious disadvantages, however, the Democrats are still hoping to score a few points with the Ebola virus.
The first small effort came from Van Jones, the former Obama administration “green czar” and a self-professed communist, who told his fellow panelists on the Cable News Network’s “Crossfire” program that “We can’t let the Republicans get away with some of the stuff they’re doing this week, just trying to bash Obama. Hey, you know, government is always your enemy until you need a friend. This Ebola thing is the best argument you can make for the kind of government we believe in.” We take this to mean that it is a legitimate function of government to protect the country from the outbreak of deadly diseases, which is such a reasonable argument that only the conservative straw men of Jones’ demented imagination would dispute it, and that the country should therefore rack up further debt to pay for the cell phone bills of Cleveland crack addicts and the phony-baloney “green energy” scams of the administration’s big contributors and all the rest of the pernicious nonsense that comprises the kind of government Jones believes in, which is complete non sequitur. The argument clearly needed some refinement, so the non-profit and allegedly non-partisan Agenda project has unveiled an advertisement in several states with close election races that explains how Republican budget-cutting is responsible for the Ebola virus’ arrival in the United States. The smart folks over at Reason persuasively makes the case the that funding for a variety of agencies devoted to preventing epidemics is hardly stingy, and we’d question the advertisements premises in any case. No evidence is presented that a few more billion would have made these programs any more effective, nor is the magic amount that would have kept the disease out of the country ever stated, and there’s always a conservative counter-argument that any necessary amount should have come out of the budget for the Cleveland crack addicts’ cell phones and those phony-baloney “green jobs” scams.
The argument that just a few more billion dollars of government spending would have the difference is growing less persuasive with each passing day and every billion added to the national debt, and is especially weak made on behalf to he current efforts to control an Ebola virus outbreak. A timely ban on travel from the infected countries would have prevented a brave young nurse from battling this usually deadly disease, and it would have been cost-effective.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 