Chip Bok's Bokbluster

President Obama was all kisses and hugs for civilian Ebola workers returning from West Africa. As for the military he’s all 21-day quarantine.

The rest of us got the usual stern Professor Obama lecture about “The Science”, complete with docs in white coats as props. Obama says “The Science” tells us we don’t need to quarantine Ebola workers because they’re doing “God’s work”. And, like the mayor of Toledo drinking a glass of Lake Erie, he shook hands and hugged his doc props to prove his point.

So why are the apparently Godless troops he sent into Ebola harms way going to be quarantined? Joe Scarborough calls this “Obama’s Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker moment”:

…for the president on the Ebola front. I know there are people that like to feel superior to others and say the American people are just hucksters or idiots.

James Taranto in the WSJ (Doctors Without Scrupples) notes that 80% of respondents in a CBS poll want to quarantine everyone coming into America from Ebola Land. So why opposite policies for civilians and military?:

What is at issue, then, is the administration’s purely discretionary decisions to order quarantines for servicemen and lean on states not to order them for civilians—a contradiction with no obvious basis, and no basis the World’s Greatest Orator and his spokesman have managed to articulate, in philosophy, law or science.

Either servicemen are being subjected to burdens with no basis in “science or best practices,” or the administration is risking public health by prioritizing the personal comfort of civilian medical workers. Why in the world are they doing this?

Ebola Workers and God’s Work

Taranto answers his own question with two possibilities: 1.) He didn’t want to make a decision to overrule his Joint Chief of Staff. 2.) The Scarborough analysis – he’s a snob:

The second is snobbery. Recall that quote from Nurse Hickox’s lawyer: “She’s a very good person.” She and others like her, according to the president, are doing God’s work, and—in pointed if inaccurate contrast to military servicemen—are “experts.” The logic would go something like this: You can’t quarantine her. She’s one of us.