Today's View From Nowhere

Is brought to you via former Bush speechwriter, professional Reasonable Conservative and emo hair flop fashion daredevil, Michael Gerson.

The context is that Mr. Gerson is having a medium-sized freakout over the degree of cynical panic profiteering going on in this here land of the free and would very much like those who are turning a buck and making political hay by using their positions of trust and authority to lie about matters of life and death to cut it the fuck out.

Draw near, and see if you can spot the moment where Mr. Gerson's perfectly reasonable premise suddenly becomes airborne and soars to a comfortable David Brooksian cruising altitude

Michael Gerson: On Ebola, hard choices

Here is what officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health have been telling us: America has some Ebola infections (and is likely to see more) but America does not have an Ebola outbreak, which is extremely unlikely in a health system capable of basic public health measures (such as isolation and contact tracing).

So: Infections but no outbreak.
...

So far, so good, right?

And then...

...
Some in the media – splicing their own agendas into the Ebola virus – have used this response (variously) to criticize governmental doublespeak, diagnose institutional rot, or slam immigration laxity.

This is political and ideological scavenging. It also pits people with limited credibility on this issue against national experts who actually know their business (as opposed to locals who sometimes don’t).

There is a time to question authority. And then there is a time to shut up and listen carefully to medical experts, who sometimes say complex and difficult things...

"Some in the media"?

"Some in the media"?

Of course, what Republican political word guy Michael Gerson means when he says "some in the media" is the Republican media Death Star:



The entire Conservative radio Wall Of Paranoid Madness.

Red-meat flinging Conservative editorial writers:

...
What did the American voters know about the prudence and uprightness of this untried man they elected president, as a result of his glib rhetoric and his racial symbolism? It is not just bad luck when a reckless gamble turns out disastrously.

No one knows at this point how big the Ebola danger may turn out to be. But what we do know is that official reassurances about this and other dangers have become worthless.

The erosion of Constitutional government over the years has become, under the Obama administration, a deluge of arbitrary edicts and defiant lawlessness protected by a grossly politicized Department of Justice.
...

And more than a few top-tier members of Mr. Gerson's Republican  party.

You know who isn't fear mongering?  Who is counseling calm and listening to medical professionals?

Virtually all of the non-Joe-Scarborough characters on the MSNBC morning cartoon cavalcade.

The thimbleful of Liberals columnists that still exist in the world.

The few basement guerrilla progressive radio stations still holding out on half-rations of diesel for their generators.

A couple of dirty hippie podcasters.

Also the President of the United States and his entire Administration.

In this fight -- as in too many such fight to count, doing back decade after decade -- the difference between the political pedigree and agenda of the lying, panic peddlers and the political pedigree and agenda of the responsible grownups is clear and bright enough to be visible from space.

Certainly clear and bright enough to be seen by Republican political word guy Michael Gerson.

But then again, like all Republican political word guys, Michael Gerson is coward by nature and a liar by vocation.

At least that's what I've heard from some in the media.