Remember all the times Obama golfed, traveled to Hawaii, vacationed in Martha’s Vineyard and the liberal media insisted that it was no big deal because an executive can do their job from anywhere?
Apparently, that rule doesn’t extend to Republican governors and while most Americans might think the government’s poor handling of Ebola looks bad for Obama, Katie Glueck of Politico is pretty sure the real loser here is Texas governor Rick Perry:
Rick Perry’s Ebola testAUSTIN, Texas — Ebola came to Texas. And Rick Perry went to Europe.Now the Republican governor, a likely presidential contender, is back in Austin and scrambling to avoid a damaging perception problem like the “oops” moment that doomed his first shot at the White House.At first, Perry seemed to have everything under control. When a man in Dallas was diagnosed with the deadly virus, Perry held an Oct. 1 news conference, assuring the public that “there are few places in the world better equipped to meet the challenges posed by this case.” When more people were quarantined, he launched a task force and told Texans to “rest assured our system is working as it should.”But then he left Sunday for a long-planned 7-day trip designed to burnish his foreign policy credentials. During his absence, two more cases of Ebola were confirmed, both of them involving Texas nurses who had dealt with the first patient.The governor cut his trip short and rushed home on Thursday, only to encounter criticism for leaving in the first place; Democrats charged that he was more focused on looking presidential overseas than on fixing a big problem at home.
See? It’s all Rick Perry’s fault, not Obama’s.
Meanwhile over at CNN, John D. Sutter thinks the real problem with Ebola is racism:
There’s evidence lighter skinned people have trouble “feeling” the pain of those with darker skin. Researchers at the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Italy, tested this in by showing a group of Caucasian people video clips of people of various races being pricked with a needle. They monitored the viewers to see how their bodies responded to the sight of another person being hurt. The white viewers reacted more strongly — or showed more physical empathy — when white people were hurt than Africans.In another study, “researchers found that white participants, black participants, and nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less pain than whites,” Slate writes.Except for a handful of health workers, nearly all of Ebola’s 4,400 casualties have been black Africans — and these simmering biases are deeply troubling.”Ebola is now a stand-in for any combination of ‘African-ness’, ‘blackness’, ‘foreign-ness’ and ‘infestation’ — poised to ruin the perceived purity of Western borders and bodies,” Hannah Giorgis wrote for The Guardian.
When it comes to politicizing Ebola, I don’t know who’s worse; Democrats or the press.
Oh wait. Same difference.
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