Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana goes all-in on Ebola paranoia

The only thing we have to fear is fireproof zombie Ebola

I would shake my head at this but then I remember a sizable fraction of our nation’s leaders and would-be leaders still believe in demon possession so believing that the incinerated ashes of an Ebola victim’s worldly belongings might rise up and something-something zombie apocalypse is sure, why not, something Republican officeholders can rally behind.

Louisiana attorney general Buddy Caldwell has a plan to stop Ebola: file a restraining order. Caldwell, a Republican, called the proposal to dispose of Dallas Ebola victim Eric Duncan’s incinerated belongings at a Lake Charles landfill “absurd” and pledged to use the legal process to stop the transfer. […]

Caldwell, whose decision was quickly supported by GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal, didn’t offer any details on how burying the incinerated materials would affect the people of his state.

We’re talking about ashes, mind you. The Dallas patient’s belongings were gathered up and burned in an incinerator, reducing them all to cinders. There’s nothing “biological” left. There’s probably a small but substantive risk of heavy metal poisoning or the like, were you so bold as to grab a spoon and start eating the stuff, but the notion that zombie Ebola is going to reconstitute itself from a pile of cinders, crawl its way on its shriveled little Ebola legs (How many legs does an Ebola have? Let’s say twelve, just to make things interesting) out of the ground and stick its thirty-seven thumbs out looking to hitch a ride to New Orleans is Not. Gonna. Happen.

This is a wonderful kicker, though:

But Caldwell’s stance is especially bizarre in light of the great lengths Louisiana lawmakers have gone to position the state as a repository for every other kind of waste. […] In Louisiana you can even store radioactive materials in an abandoned salt cavern, and then, after the salt cavern collapses, creating a massive sinkhole and forcing hundreds of people to permanently relocate, pour wastewater directly into the sinkhole.

So throw the ashes in that sinkhole, what’s the damn problem?

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I know, I know—it’s just a case of selective paranoia. We don’t want that bag of ashes, but come back to us when you’ve got something radioactive or that’ll work it’s way into the groundwater. Let the next governor worry about the ashes of any poor sap who drinks a glass of Louisiana tap water, amiright? In the meantime we might want to do something a bit more productive and, for example, better fund actual science efforts to stop Ebola, but that would be hard. Filing lawsuits against Ebola, on the other hand, will probably turn out to be a real vote-getter.