Outbreak of stupidity, not Ebola, is sweeping the U.S.

One person has died of Ebola inside the U.S. border. One person. One person, by the way, who contracted the deadly disease in Liberia, not here in the United States.

Two nurses who worked on that one person have also been diagnosed with Ebola. Two nurses, in one hospital, in one state where protocol doesn’t seem to matter, from one man who recently traveled to West Africa.

CNN: Crisis! Outbreak! Armageddon!

Fox News: Obama’s fault! Enact counter-productive travel ban!

MSNBC: Nobody watches MSNBC, so I honestly couldn’t tell you how their coverage has been.

Add all of that to an overreacting, frankly stupid, social media freak-out from the general public, and I’m starting to think contracting Ebola would be a better outcome than having to listen to all of this.

Unfortunately, we’re all more likely to get struck by lightning and eaten by a shark simultaneously than get this disease, so it looks like there’s no choice but to endure this torturous, freak-show of a response from a dimwitted populace and an even more foolish media.

I can just imagine that when Shepard Smith, a Fox News anchor, was making his much-needed comments about the media’s terrible response to all of this, he really just wanted to shout into the cameras, “Morons! Morons! All of you!”

If you think I’m being harsh, fine, but I don’t think I’m being harsh enough.

We live in a country where we overreact about everything except the things we should overreact about.

When twenty first grade students are gunned down in a classroom, we all shrug our shoulders and say, “that’s just the price of freedom.” Yeah, the media and the sheep who tune in pretend they care for a couple days, but there’s no real attempt to, say, reduce the amount of gun deaths in this country, which currently stand at over 30,000 people every year.

If you’re keeping score at home: Guns – 30,000+ (per year); Ebola – 1.

Obesity, just as American as guns and apple pie, is related to 300,000 deaths per year. No, that’s not a typo. Literally, one in five American deaths is related to being morbidly fat. Oh, but our First Lady suggests that our schools offer more veggies and less corn syrup and suddenly people are shouting, “Communism!”

“Stop talking about obesity and just get me a side of gravy and the 90 oz. bucket of Mountain Dew, please! ‘Merica!”

Obesity – 300,000 (per year); Ebola – 1.

If you think I’m just cherry-picking two examples, then I’d like you to do an exercise for me:

1. Close your eyes
2. Spin around 10 times
3. Point at something
4. Open your eyes

Whatever you just pointed at has killed more people in the United States than Ebola has.

The list of these deadlier things is endless, from malaria and influenza to diabetes and mosquitoes. Any of them are more deserving of a national outcry than Ebola. So either start caring about those things, too, or stop freaking out about a disease you’ll never catch.

When will we stop listening to Dick Cheney?

Think of things that the average person complains about: the internet is slow or their sports team loses a crucial game or, God forbid, they get stopped by a train on their daily commute.

In the moment, these things are frustrating to a lot of people, myself included. But some perspective on these “hardships” never hurts.

Somewhere, right now, someone has a terminal illness or has no means to get food or water. Somewhere else, a flood just swept away a family’s house or a person’s child was just the victim of gun violence.

It sounds depressing – and it is – but it gives you something to be mindful of as you scream at a slow-moving train or throw your laptop across the room because the Wi-Fi isn’t working. A lot of our problems aren’t that bad when we put them in perspective.

This is when former (Vice) President – and current spokesperson for Shameless Hypocrisy, Inc. – Dick Cheney comes into the discussion.

When you think about our country’s current situation, especially in Iraq, don’t forget how badly degraded our standing in the world was when Cheney was shaping foreign policy.

When we waged war in Iraq, based on faulty intelligence and questionable motives, what did Cheney and company say?

The conflict would only take months. Wrong.

There were weapons of mass destruction. Wrong.

It would be a quick and easy war. Wrong.

There was a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. Wrong.

If being wrong was a crime, Cheney would be serving at least three life sentences in prison. And maybe he should, since his failure to get things right resulted in thousands of dead U.S. soldiers.

Not only was he wrong, but his insistence that we invade and occupy Iraq only served to undermine the U.S. operation in Afghanistan, where we seemingly let the 9/11 perpetrators off the hook. It was only until the Bush/Cheney administration left office that we shifted our foreign policy back toward Afghanistan and finally took out Osama bin Laden and a whole host of other al-Qaeda leaders.

So Mr. Cheney was wrong on just about every foreign policy decision he had a role in making when he was in office. Yet, for some mind-boggling reason, the current Republican Party is taking their policy tips from him, all while the media keep giving him a platform on which to shamelessly talk about how bad the current president’s foreign policy is.

How many more times does Cheney have to screw up before we stop listening to him?

All of this is not to say that these are boom times for America’s foreign policy. What I’m saying is that we, the American people, shouldn’t confuse a slow-moving train for a terminal illness. We should not confuse today’s challenges in the middle east with the inept foreign policy perpetuated by Dick Cheney and friends.

Instead, whenever Cheney opens the lopsided orifice on his face, we should remember just how bad things were when he was influencing U.S. policy decisions – foreign and domestic – and how awful things could be if Cheney were still in charge.

Oh, and he shot a guy in the face for God’s sake.

Fox host Megyn Kelly shows misleading Bush speech from 2007

There is not enough time in any person’s life to correct the copious amounts of misleading information that Fox News shamelessly vomits into the minds of its loyal viewers. But every once in a while, the “fair and balanced” network drops a pile of shit – excuse my language – so large that it’s impossible not to step in it.

It’s bad enough to stumble upon their network one evening and hear their blatantly disingenuous “reporting,” but it’s even more frustrating to see that some people actually buy into it.

On Thursday night, Megyn Kelly, host of the Kelly File, showed a video clip of what she called a “frighteningly accurate” warning from George W. Bush in 2007. In the clip, Bush defended the troop surge taking place at the time and said that leaving Iraq too soon – before the Iraqis could control their own country – would have dire circumstances.

This proves, according to Kelly, that Bush was right about Iraq all along. Heck, he even predicted what is unfolding in the region today.

To the average Fox viewer, the lack of any meaningful context is something they have come to love and admire about their favorite news channel.  What viewers of a network like this want is the ability to draw a line from earth’s ills directly back to President Barack Obama, regardless of how delusional the argument is.

But, if you remember doing “connect the dots” in kindergarten, you’d know that you can’t just connect the number one dot to the number eight dot and hope the rest of us don’t notice.

That’s what Megyn Kelly tried to pull on her viewers Thursday night.

The point of the troop surge – the same surge Bush was defending in the video clip shown by Kelly – was to establish a “unified, democratic federal Iraq that can govern itself, defend itself, and sustain itself, and is an ally in the War on Terror.” In other words, the surge was meant to stabilize the region and create an environment where the Iraqis can stand on their own feet so, ultimately, the United States could get the hell out.

A year after that 2007 statement, the Bush administration was satisfied with the results of the surge, and President Bush signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq. The agreement required that American combat troops withdraw by June 30, 2009, and that by December 31, 2011, all American troops leave Iraq altogether.

Again, this was signed by George W. Bush.

Megyn Kelly may have had a valid argument to make if she didn’t just ignore what happened between Bush’s 2007 speech and what’s happening in Iraq today. But even George W. Bush, the architect of the Iraq debacle, had agreed to have troops leave when they ultimately did. And whether it’s George W. Bush signing the SOFA or Barack Obama implementing it, leaving Iraq was what the American people overwhelmingly wanted. And, today, the public still doesn’t want to jump into another ground war in the Middle East.

I get it – Fox News has an agenda to which they must strictly adhere. But facts matter, and so does context. Avid Fox News viewers may be drawn to this type of shoddy reporting – mainly because it aligns with their far right ideology – but the rest of us shouldn’t be fooled.

Thoughts on Ukraine/Russia/Putin/GOP

1. I’m sick and tired of Republican politicians in the United States actually praising Vladimir Putin as some figure of strength, simply because he’s in opposition to President Obama. He’s a thug who broke international law, and he shouldn’t be trusted. It’s amazing how far the GOP will go in order to oppose or attack the president. 
2. To Fox News: I get that your purpose as a propaganda machine is to blame every ill in the world on our allegedly Kenyan president, but stop making it so obvious. For some reason, your network and your mindless viewers like to blame things like terrorist attacks or preemptive Russian invasions on Barack Obama. Have you ever tried blaming terrorists or dictators for their wrongdoings?
3. Why do you think Putin isn’t taking the United States seriously when we tell him to deescalate? Do the morons who twice-elected George W. Bush seriously wonder why Putin isn’t listening to the country who created the debacle in Iraq? It turns out that when you start a war based on false pretenses, it takes some time before countries take you seriously again.
4. If we listened to some people in the GOP – see Arizona Sen. John McCain – the United States would be balls deep in military conflicts with Syria, Iran, Libya and Russia by now. Most Americans support a foreign policy of thinking first and shooting later – especially after the last decade. It is not weakness to resist military action and pursue diplomatic solutions.
5. Do you guys remember when the fools who supported George W. Bush called it treasonous to question their commander-in-chief during times of foreign conflict (see video above)? Keep in mind: this is the guy who oversaw the most deadly terrorist attack in our country’s history, waged a preemptive war in Iraq that was based on concocted “intelligence,” and strained some of our most important international alliances. Now these people are wondering, after over a decade of questionable American military involvement, why a thug like Vladimir Putin isn’t taking the United States seriously?
   

Sigh.

Fox News is waging the real ‘War on Christmas’

With each passing moment, my opinion of Fox News deteriorates just a little bit more.  Unfortunately, I just can’t not watch it, sort of like a car accident on the side of the road – a major car accident.

And, indeed, the Fox News wreckage continued this week when Megyn Kelly placed her foot, five-inch heel included, squarely into her mouth when discussing a Slate article entitled “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore”.

On her show, “The Kelly File,” which sounds like a program that should have been on Nickelodeon in the ’90s, she responded by saying this:

“When I saw this headline, I kinda laughed and I said, ‘Oh, this is ridiculous. Yet another person claiming it’s racist to have a white Santa.’ And by the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white. But this person is maybe just arguing that we should also have a black Santa. But, you know, Santa is what he is, and just so you know, we’re just debating this because someone wrote about it, kids.”

Obviously, there is a part of this that’s built into any Fox News job description: rebut any argument that suggests the obvious fact that the United States is becoming less white.

Still, I don’t believe this comment makes Megyn Kelly a racist. What I do believe, however, is that this underscores the fact that Megyn Kelly is a fool.

First of all, Ms. Kelly, Santa doesn’t exist, sort of like actual news reporting on your network. He may be based on St. Nicholas, but his appearance really depends on personal interpretation.  What’s magical about Santa Claus, at least from the perspective of children who spend their childhoods believing in him, is the fact that he is what they want him to be. He is a blank canvas that all children can paint their hopes and dreams onto.

Corny? Sure, but it’s still the truth. And it becomes especially true since we live in an America that is increasingly diverse and decreasingly pale.

Oh, but Megyn Kelly didn’t stop there. Just to make her blindfolded version of history a little more evident to the viewers, Kelly went on to assure all of us that Jesus was white, too.

Now this is where she lost any viewer with a functioning brain. While Santa’s exact description may depend on one’s own interpretation of him, Jesus’s race or skin color, although widely debated, has a bit more certainty to it.

Most experts and historians haven’t settled on his exact ethnicity, but as BBC News points out, “It can almost certainly be said that Jesus would not have been white.” And, when you really think about it, why would Jesus be white, given his origins?

I guess this could all be chalked up to another case of Fox News being Fox News. After all, it’s widely known that the conservative propaganda network doesn’t have the most effective fact-checkers.

But isn’t it ironic that the only real Christmas controversy on cable news is coming from Fox, the network that keeps accusing others of waging a war on the Christian holiday?

If there really is a “War on Christmas,” as Fox News Channel so passionately declares, it’s not being waged by MSNBC or Democrats or the store clerk who says, “Happy Holidays.” It’s being waged by Fox News – and Megyn Kelly just fired the first shot.