Politicizing Ebola

I think it took Texas Senator Ted Cruz ten seconds to turn an interviewer's question about a Dallas hospital's Ebola protocols into a condemnation of President Obama for not shutting off flights from West Africa.  Forget the downside of that approach expressed by the administration and many on the front lines trying to stamp out Ebola at its source as that area faces the prospect of 10,000 new cases each week. Senator Cruz and others also overlook the fact that there are already no direct commercial flights from West Africa to the U.S.   Then there is the chorus of Republican criticism of Obama appointing someone who is not a doctor to be "Ebola czar" after the GOP has kept the position of the nation's number one spokesperson, surgeon general, unfilled for the past year.  If the new Ebola czar is so eminently qualified at implementation of a strategy, that should bring some badly needed coordination in this fight where medicine has yet to find a vaccine.    This is potentially serious business on a worldwide scale.   Cheap political shots trivialize it.

Then there's the right wing media creating unnecessary panic and bringing every Obama hater who believes this disease is God's plan to punish humanity.   One example recently was WPRO's John DePetro, a man who exploited fear over Ebola to condemn President Obama and Rhode Island Democratic leaders over not taking more of a leadership role.   DePetro didn't stop there.   He said he had just spent $400 stocking up on things for what he saw as an inevitable pandemic and predicted whole school systems would shut down and we could expect to all be quarantined for weeks.   That really brought the nut jobs out of the woodwork.   DePetro was obviously stoked... over what it would do for ratings.   WPRO as a whole is better than this.