John McCain was on the
Sunday news programs this past weekend because OF COURSE HE WAS; this time it
was to talk about Ebola and to engage that most time-honored of repugican shrieking point gymnastics, the backwards 180-degree flip with
righthand trunk spin. Stick the landing, fella.
John McCain (r-Ariz.) on Sunday called for President Obama to
nominate an Ebola "czar" to coordinate the administration's response to
the deadly virus.
"I'd like to know who's in charge," McCain said on CNN's "State of the Union." [...]
In
the past, McCain had been critical of Obama's use of so-called "czars"
to name lead officials on particular matters. In 2009, McCain tweeted
that Obama had "more czars than the Romanovs - who ruled Russia for 3
centuries."
Thus McCain, as usual, follows in the footsteps of
the House crazy person caucus, but now the Republicans demand that Obama
institute an "Ebola czar" even after those selfsame repugicans were
muttering about abuse of power and tyranny and impeachment over the
"czars" the gubbermint already had has been catapulted into the Sunday
show orbits of Serious Debate, by mere virtue of Sunday John saying it.
We don't have enough czars. We demand more czars! Why isn't Obama
leading by appointing czars?
Mind you, why John McCain
is on our TVs to talk about Ebola at all is a question unto itself,
but since it is an apparent requirement, we might point out that a
public health czar is exactly what a Surgeon General would be, except
that we do not have one because John McCain's fellow repugican senators
refuse to confirm one (the nominee for the position had at one
point expressed the medical opinion that getting shot might be dangerous
to your health, which was all it took to make him persona non grata to
the pro-getting-shot crowd). We might also point out that the repugican
insistence on shrinking the public-health duties of our government has
led to the intended effect of shrinking the public-health duties of our
government, and that the persons in charge of those public-health duties
are of the opinion that America is less able to respond to Ebola than
we ought to be due to those repugican cuts. Even as John McCain appears
on the Sunday shows, his allies continue to block a wider government
response.
We are living,
in other words, in the precise situation that John McCain and the
rest of his caucus demanded we live in. Small government response
because a bigger response would Cost Money, with nobody in charge
because John McCain's Senate has worked at every turn to prevent
anyone from being placed in charge. Oh-and there is also the unfortunate
coincidence of the original victim arriving in Texas, one of the repugican states most insistent on blocking expanded national
healthcare efforts in order to deny the opposing president the perceived
political "win" of having fewer of their own citizens die.
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