There’s no need to panic, of course. This is just one of many possibilities. But the fact that this virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented should make us all pay close attention. And some people are, including the president who made a big speech this week in which he announced that he would send 3,000 troops to Africa in an effort that will “entail command and control, logistics expertise, training, and engineering support.” The administration is being forthright that this is a very serious crisis and
may cost upward of a billion dollars to successfully combat.
Now if there’s one thing we can usually count on from the right it’s that they will back the troops. Indeed, their first reflex is to send in the armed forces to solve just about any crisis, especially overseas. Right now they are nearly frothing at the mouth over President Obama’s ISIS strategy because it doesn’t include enough of an armed commitment to eradicate what they see as a uniquely dangerous threat to America. Sen. Lindsey Graham shrieked on behalf of the entire American right wing when he declared over the weekend:
“[T]hey’re intending to come here. So, I will not let this president suggest to the American people we can outsource our security and this is not about our safety. There is no way in hell you can form an army on the ground to go into Syria, to destroy ISIL without a substantial American component. And to destroy ISIL, you have to kill or capture their leaders, take the territory they hold back, cut off their financing and destroy their capability to regenerate.
“This is a war we’re fighting, it is not a counterterrorism operation! This is not Somalia; this is not Yemen; this is a turning point in the war on terror. Our strategy will fail yet again. This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.”
If they survive our best shot, this is the last best chance, to knock him out, then they will open the gates of hell to spill out on the world. This is not a Sunni versus Sunni problem, this is ISIL versus mankind!”
They are, as Graham illustrates there, nearly paralyzed with fear over the threat of ISIS and are demanding that the president commit to all-out war with American troops on the ground to stop them. One can only assume they mean for the U.S. to occupy the entire Middle East for the foreseeable future as John McCain once quipped he was prepared to do “for a hundred years.” They certainly haven’t offered any other scenarios that would address the issues in the comprehensive way they seem to think is necessary.
And all of this hand-wringing is despite numerous intelligence analyses that show ISIS is not an immediate threat to the United States (but rather a threat to the fragile order in the Middle East, which isn’t the same thing). They are hysterical about the possibility of an ISIS terrorist sneaking over the border to kill us all in our beds because we have failed to build a thousand-mile wall high enough or a moat deep enough to keep everyone out forever. (As
Joan Walsh documented, the threat as “exposed” by James O’Keefe and company is almost too ludicrous to even be funny.)
Former congressman and Tea Party icon Allen West:
The world need to step up against Islamo-fascism but I suppose fighting Ebola is easier for a faux Commander-in-Chief than to fight a real enemy of America. Nice optics there Barack, good try to change the subject, and make yourself seem like a leader fighting a really bad flu bug — all the while you dismiss the cockroaches who behead Americans.
Sean Hannity said that we should be sending those 3,000 soldiers to Iraq. (He did say he felt “bad” for the people who had Ebola, though, so he isn’t a total monster.) Rush also complained that we are sending troops to “fight” Ebola (which he claimed not to understand) when we should be sending them to fight ISIS. But nobody sounded more shockingly ignorant than the Cersei Lannister of the right wing, Laura Ingraham:
“I’m just getting very confused about the nature of this enemy. Is it those scary little worms that Drudge always has on the Drudge Report? The scary little Ebola worms? Is that the real threat to national security?”
The woman went to Dartmouth.
She did go on to say that if we really want to stop Ebola the way to do it is to seal our borders. (For her, Ebola and small child refugees are the same thing.) Of course these people aren’t big believers in science, we knew that, so one supposes it’s too much to ask for most of them to be able to tell the difference between lurid terrorist propaganda and a real existential threat from a deadly disease. (
Some of them even believe that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark, which means they lived alongside humans.) Expecting them to understand the meaning of a real threat may be a bit beyond their capability.
Everyone should just pat these “thought leaders” on the head and say “that’s nice” whenever they start screeching about the next wave of scary monsters coming to kill us all in our beds. They don’t know what they’re talking about.
There may be monsters coming to kill us. But we can’t see them with the naked eye. And they aren’t making YouTube videos.
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