From Charles Pierce, writing about the ebola fear-mongering by right wingers, in which science and medical opinion are simply ignored:
"The country simply cannot go on this way, with one of our two political parties completely insane, and with a counter-cultural universe that claims the right to promulgate its own science as equal to the science produced by actual scientists, and with this dangerous lunacy treated as legitimate by powerful people who ought to know better. As I once wrote, it doesn't matter how many people vote for the anti-gravity party, you still can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. A dangerous disease is not a matter of debate. Your profitable fantasy and the reality of the disease do not deserve an equal place in the discussion of what we as a society will do about the disease. The response is going to have to be precise and empirical. It is going to have to be impatient with cant, and immune to the delusions on which demented ideology feeds. And, most important of all, we are going to have to trust each other, and we are going to have to trust our government, which is the political manifestation of all of us, no matter what 30 years of Reaganite heresy has taught us. We are going to have to trust ourselves as individual citizens, and we are going to have to trust ourselves as partners in the creative act of self-government. I am afraid we will not, because there is one side of our politics who will stand in the way, and another side of our politics that is too frightened or too polite to call dangerous nonsense to account, and to shun the people who are promoting it. And that is what scares me the most about the man in Texas with the disease."
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