As Rahm Emanuel advised, Democrats should never let a good crisis go to waste.
That’s what they’re doing over at MSNBC. Exploiting the Ebola crisis to trash Republicans who are opposed to Obama’s choice for surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy.
Back in March we wrote about Murthy, who “is a rabid anti-Second Amendment ideologue who believes firearms ownership is a public health issue. Murthy is the president and co-founder of Doctors for America, an organization that melds healthcare and support for gun control legislation.”
Murthy’s organization, Doctors for America, believes the Second Amendment is a health issue.
“For few other issues would we tolerate this state of affairs. If tens of thousands of Americans died every year of an infectious disease and there was no policy response, there would be a public outcry. If research clearly demonstrated that there were simple solutions to prevent all these deaths and still nothing changed, public health experts would be furious. It is time for us to recognize that we must take action to save thousands of lives and demand change from our politicians.”
Naturally, this brought a strong response from advocates of the Constitution and the Second Amendment, including Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Murthy’s nomination was opposed by the NRA and held up by Republicans.
On Friday, Krystal Ball and Anne Thompson, writing for MSNBC, said the United States needs a Surgeon General to deal with the Ebola crisis:
If only there was someone around who could educate the American public about the actual level of risk. Someone who was trusted as a public health expert and whose job it was to help us understand what we really need to worry about and what precautions we should take.
Actually, that is one of the primary responsibilities of the United States surgeon general. There’s just one problem: Thanks to Senate dysfunction and NRA opposition, we don’t have a surgeon general right now. In fact, we haven’t had a surgeon general for more than a year now — even though the president nominated the eminently qualified Dr. Vivek Murthy back in November 2013.
The Surgeon General is the operational head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a “uniformed service” of the government. The Surgeon General spends most of his or her time handing out public health awards and decorations and proselytizing the public on what the government considers health issues. Probably the most famous and well-known of these is the warning printed on the side of a pack of cigarettes and on alcoholic beverage bottles.
This bureaucrat attached to the Pentagon will have zero impact on Ebola. MSNBC is either unaware of this or is merely exploiting Ebola to criticize Republicans in the Senate for refusing to confirm the nomination of Murthy, who is an anti-Second Amendment ideologue.
Never let a good crisis go to waste. Instead of addressing the real issue – the government is encouraging Ebola patients to enter the United States under a politically correct “right of return” and thus seriously endangering public health – MSNBC is turning a deadly disease into a political football.
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