I may come off as a deeply cynical person and to some extent I am. BUT I also try  to think the best of people and hope that they’ll eventually do the right thing. It’s getting harder and harder to believe that given the fact that an entire political party and its cable news mouthpiece have gone stark, raving mad. The GOP response to Ebola is one of the worst things I’ve seen in my lifetime and that is why Ebola scaremongers are the malakas of the week.

Where do I begin? The same people who believed Bush and Chaney that Iraq had WMDs are convinced that President Obama and the evil “liberal virologists” are lying about how Ebola is transmitted. People like Mike Huckabee and Rushbo don’t explain why they’d do such a thing, they just scream: BENGHAZI; IRS;  BEGHAZI;  FAST & FURIOUS; OBAMACARE; SECRET SERVICE; BENGHAZI.  (I nearly used an exclamation point, which shows you how bad things are.) All they know how to do is mash down on hot buttons and never let up. This involves public health and people in public life should be calming folks down, not lighting their hair on fire. I know that’s too much to hope for from the arsonists on the right.

The right’s anti-science agenda is coming home to roost. They’ve spent years promulgating crazy notions about vaccines, evolution, climate change and on and on and on. They seem to be incapable of accepting *any* medical or scientific facts whatsoever. They mutter darkly about liberal scientists. Here’s the deal. I’m married to a scientist and have spent a lot of time around PHDs and MDs over the last 25 years. Scientists *used* to be largely apolitical and only became “liberals” because of right wing attacks on research funding and the scientific method.

There are still quite a few conservative physicians but they tend to be older, white males. Sound familiar? In fact, there’s a doctor who’s waving the banner for malakatude:

A doctor in Atlanta who dressed up in a containment suit that said “CDC Is Lying!” on the back got write-ups in conservative conspiracy havens like The Blaze and World Net Daily (as well as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

“Once this disease consumes every third world country, as surely it will, because they lack the same basic infrastructure as Sierra Leone and Liberia, at that point, we will be importing clusters of Ebola on a daily basis,” the doctor, Gil Mobley, said. “That will overwhelm any advanced country’s ability to contain the clusters in isolation and quarantine. That spells bad news.”

Dr. Mobley Dick should STFU, read some Ayn Rand and go Galt so he won’t cause any more harm. I understand he’s a libertarian and an advocate for medical marijuana so he should roll a big fat doobie and smoke his brains out. If the weed is strong enough, he’ll forget his crack pot theory for awhile and leave the rest of us alone.

The news that Thomas Eric Duncan has died will only inflame the wingnut malakas,so all we can do is batten down the hatches and hope that someone on the right will denounce these idiots. I am not holding my breath. The Republican base is throwing a collective tantrum and holding their breaths until they turn blue. They should be put in the corner for an epic time-out but I have no illusions that it will work. Their brains (if you want to call them that) are highly susceptible to conspiracy theories and the spectre of a deadly virus only whips them up into a fever.

There are times when I wish we could quarantine certain wingnuts but we can’t. All we can do is call a malaka a malaka. And that is why Ebola scaremongers are the malakas of the week.