Several GOP politicians campaigned this year on stoking fears about the Ebola virus, warning that an Ebola epidemic was about to sweep the United States and it was all President Obama’s fault for failing to handle the crisis appropriately and shut down the border with Mexico.
The Obama administration is focused on stopping the epidemic in West Africa, where this year’s outbreak started — rather than blocking it from coming in from Mexico, where there have been zero Ebola cases — by building up the region’s wrecked health care infrastructure. And thanks to aggressive monitoring and treatment, as of today there is not a single known case of Ebola in the U.S.
So, after criticizing Obama for doing too little to fight Ebola, now several conservative commentators are attacking Obama for doing too much to quell the spread of virus.
Betsy McCaughey, the conservative columnist behind the “death panel” smear of Obamacare, derided the administration’s latest proposal, which she calls “Ebolacare,” to help build a stronger health care system in West African countries as “a typical Obama administration spread-the-wealth scheme kicked up a notch to redistribute American resources to poor countries.” Writing in her syndicated column yesterday, McCaughey lamented that the potential “shifting [of] resources to Africa” is “twice what we give Israel.”
McCaughey previously accused the Centers for Disease Control of “lying” about the ways people can contract Ebola and said Obama was putting American lives “at risk for the sake of political correctness.”
George Russell of Fox News writes today that conservatives fear “the crisis is being used to jam a massive dose of spending through the lame-duck Congress.” He interviews Dr. Tom Stossel of the American Enterprise Institute, who says that the plan to fight Ebola is just an excuse for “throwing money at various government agencies.”
Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, who warned last month said Obama was “letting these diseased people into this country to infect our own people” in order to make the U.S. more like Africa, urged Republicans to resist bipartisanship and refuse to fund the proposed measures to fight Ebola.
She told notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Monday that Obama “said he won’t close our borders to people with Ebola. He wants $6 billion so he can set up a plan to stop Ebola in West Africa, now we didn’t elect him for that and Congress, which holds the purse strings, they shouldn’t give him the money.”
