Keep Calm and Fight Ebola
Sometimes it's hard to tell which is more terrifying: Ebola or the commentary about it.
On Monday, radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested that President Barack Obama is refusing to divert flights from Liberia and other Ebola-infected countries because of some sort of racial payback.
Since the U.S. established Liberia as a home for freed American slaves, Limbaugh conjectured that Obama and other so-called "politically correct" liberals "think we (Americans) kind of deserve a little bit of this" Ebola epidemic.
If that black-payback theme sounds familiar, you may recall that Limbaugh sounded a similar note of racial grievance during the health care debate in 2010, calling the proposal now widely called "Obamacare" a sneaky liberal "civil rights bill" and "reparations." Hey, if it worked with Rush's office once, he'll keep using it.
Not to be outdone in the crazy-talk contest, the aptly named radio host Michael Savage accused Obama of trying to "bring infected children into a nation" and sending troops "into a hot Ebola zone." "It rises to levels of treason," he said. "It actually exceeds any level of treason I've ever seen."
As a potentate of paranoid punditry, he's probably seen quite a bit, I'm sure.
On the other side of the racial divide, we have such old familiar voices as Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan. On his movement's website, The Final Call, he revives an old conspiracy theory by describing Ebola and AIDS as "race targeting weapons" created to kill only blacks "because it is a genotype weapon that is designed for your genes, for your race, for your kind."
As an African-American, I have had ample personal reasons to look into such theories for almost 30 years, yet I have yet to find even a sliver of hard evidence of any such conspiracy. But, as the old saying goes, if you tell a big enough falsehood, wittingly or unwittingly, you don't need evidence for it to have a big impact.
In fact, the measures that the Obama administration announced on Wednesday are notably similar to those Texas Gov. Rick Perry, among other Republicans, recommended: "enhanced screening procedures" and "fully staffed quarantine stations" at "all points of entry" to the United States.
Obama's plans differ from Perry's in limiting the screening to airports in Atlanta, Chicago, New Jersey, New York and Washington, D.C., which the administration says will cover about 95 percent of visitors from the infected African countries.
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