The Midterm Elections Expose The Rot In Elite Conservatism

Trump’s demagoguery comes straight from the conservative movement.

By Zach Carter

10/27/2018

On Oct. 16, 2014, the MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace went on national television and said something terrifying.

“I saw the movie ?Outbreak’ nearly two decades ago,” Wallace told viewers of ”Morning Joe.” “This is exactly how Ebola spread and became a very dramatic national catastrophe.”

A week earlier, a Liberian man named Thomas Eric Duncan had died of Ebola in Dallas, and two of the nurses who treated him had contracted the virus. To Wallace, a former staffer for President George W. Bush, the government response had been dreadful. “We weren’t prepared,” she said, welcoming comparisons from other TV guests to Hurricane Katrina. “In my White House, we had plans on the shelf for bird flu. Avian flu is less contagious and less fatal.”

Two days before Wallace took to ”Morning Joe,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that “people at the highest levels of our government” believed Americans “deserve” to get Ebola “because of slavery.” Laura Ingraham said President Barack Obama was risking American lives in an attempt to atone for colonialism. Writing in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens called for a ban on “all nonessential travel” to Ebola-infected countries, insisting that “expert opinion should be viewed as mistaken until proven otherwise” because our government was “inherently and inescapably incompetent.” House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) held an an Ebola hearing in which he invoked the deaths of “at least 20 million people” from the 1918 influenza pandemic and declared that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasn’t telling the truth about about the virus or its risks. “What we don’t know could kill us,” Issa intoned.

The Ebola outbreak that began in 2014 was a major global health crisis. More than 11,000 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia eventually died from the disease, which still claims lives in outbreaks that continue to this day.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-midterm-elections-are-exposing-the-rot-in-elite-conservatism_us_5bd06db5e4b055bc9486eed9