Monday, October 13, 2014

The Fly In The Ointment



It's coming together like a hurricane and high tide, as obvious as a flood if only teabaggers and the people they love to elect could see it:
... NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It's not like we suddenly woke up and thought, 'Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'" Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready." It's not just the production of a vaccine that has been hampered by money shortfalls. Collins also said that some therapeutics to fight Ebola "were on a slower track than would've been ideal, or that would have happened if we had been on a stable research support trajectory." "We would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference," he said...
Teabaggerism, as manifested in R budgets, as manifested in the dishonest math of "conservative" icon Paul Ryan, as demonstrated time and again ever since Ronald Reagan first confused a movie script with reality, doesn't work. Can't work. Has never worked.

Oh, in some imaginary world, maybe. A world in which the climate is impervious to our emissions, in which everyone already has a job and no one ever gets sick, and in which roads never get potholes. It works in that world I can almost see from here, the one Sarah Palin can see from her porch and which teabaggers see through their blinders, where all kids are born healthy, well-fed, with money to burn and with internet portals implanted in their brains, giving them ready access to all knowledge.

Over here, though, where our particularly benevolent god, the one who oversaw the writing of our constitution and who speaks only to Republicans and who has a plan for us all, America's god, who knows each of us before we're born, has chosen to put together a few nucleotide pairs, call it ebola and toss it out among us for the grins -- not to mention cancer and Alzheimer's and the occasional mudslide -- and has penciled into his script the tendency of people to maim and mutilate each other, to wage wars and god knows (literally knows, so they say) what else, cutting funds for helping people in order to "pay" (other than the fact that it doesn't) for tax cuts for wealthy people and for more aircraft carriers and tanks we don't need, well, in that world, the real world, there are consequences to such charlatanism.

Over there, beyond the horizon separating fact from fiction, in the place where Fox "news," peddles its propaganda, where they trot out their preferred psychopaths and lunatics daily to tell us how Obama has created Ebola to punish white people for ... Africa or something, where they're mongering fear the way Pike Place Market mongers fish, a sense of irony seems absent entirely. In that parallel universe, and in the minds of their listeners, so carefully cultivated to consume without question, it seems not to have occurred to them that their constant support for those who'd dismantle government and their nonstop efforts to discredit those who'd like to strengthen it might be a factor in the extent to which we are unprepared for such eventualities as god's punishment for gays.

Why, I wonder, does it take the marginal threat of an epidemic here to get people thinking about this stuff, when the ongoing and obvious disaster of climate change has been, and remains, in the "minds" of Fox nation, a myth? Is it because viruses don't care if you're on food stamps?

Or maybe god got tired of teabaggers ignoring his teachings and figured the only way to shake them out of their unchristian selfishness was to tap into their unchristian selfishness.

If you're a teabagger, your guess isn't as good as mine.

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