Sen. John McCain was on the Sunday news programs this weekend because OF COURSE HE WAS; this time it was to talk about Ebola and to engage that most time-honored of Republican talking point gymnastics, the backwards 180-degree flip with righthand trunk spin. Stick the landing, fella.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Sunday called for President Obama to nominate an Ebola “czar” to coordinate the administration’s response to the deadly virus.
“I’d like to know who’s in charge,” McCain said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” […]
In the past, McCain had been critical of Obama’s use of so-called “czars” to name lead officials on particular matters. In 2009, McCain tweeted that Obama had “more czars than the Romanovs — who ruled Russia for 3 centuries.”
Thus McCain, as usual, follows in the footsteps of the House crazy person caucus, but now the Republicans demand that Obama institute an “Ebola czar” even after those selfsame Republicans were muttering about abuse of power and tyranny and impeachment over the “czars” the gubbermint already had has been catapulted into the Sunday show orbits of Serious Debate, by mere virtue of Sunday John saying it. We don’t have enough czars. We demand more czars! Why isn’t Obama leading by appointing czars?
Mind you, why John McCain is on our teevees to talk about Ebola at all is a question unto itself, but since it is an apparent requirement, we might point out that a public health czar is exactly what a Surgeon General would be, except that we do not have one because John McCain’s fellow Republican senators refuse to confirm one (the nominee for the position had at one point expressed the medical opinion that getting shot might be dangerous to your health, which was all it took to make him persona non grata to the pro-getting-shot crowd). We might also point out that the Republican insistence on shrinking the public-health duties of our government has led to the intended effect of shrinking the public-health duties of our government, and that the persons in charge of those public-health duties are of the opinion that America is less able to respond to Ebola than we ought to be due to those Republican cuts. Even as John McCain appears on the Sunday shows, his allies continue to block a wider government response.
We are living, in other words, in the precise situation that Sen. John McCain and the rest of his caucus demanded we live in. Small government response because a bigger response would Cost Money, with nobody in charge because Sen. John McCain’s Senate has worked at every turn to prevent anyone from being placed in charge. Oh—and there is also the unfortunate coincidence of the original victim arriving in Texas, one of the Republican states most insistent on blocking expanded national healthcare efforts in order to deny the opposing president the perceived political “win” of having fewer of their own citizens die.
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It’s the shining city on the hill, everyone. Enjoy your stay. If John McCain had half the courage his campaign posters supposed him to have, he’d be appearing on the Sunday shows to defend all of this as good, solid Republicanism. Instead he’s mumbling about how our enshrunken’d government isn’t responding bigly enough and how there just aren’t enough czars these days.
