Obama: Hey, I hugged and kissed the medical staff treating Ebola patients
By Dan Calabrese October 16, 2014
Here is the final word on Ebola safety. Barack Obama never does anything without carefully thinking through the potential negative consequences, right? The man who let Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi write his health care takeover bill, who prematurely pulled combat troops from Iraq, who exploded federal spending . . . right, that guy surely wouldn’t act impulsively in deciding who to put his mouth all over with Ebola spreading, right?
I bet you feel safer now:
Speaking to reporters after a meeting with cabinet secretaries and other top federal officials, Obama said Ebola is being “taken very seriously at the highest levels of government,” but stressed that the risk of infection for the average American remains very low.
Obama said he had been in close contact with nurses at Emory University hospital who cared for two American Ebola patients.
“I shook hands with, hugged and kissed not the doctors, but a couple of the nurses at Emory, because of the valiant work that they did in treating one of the patients. They followed the protocols, they knew what they were doing, and I felt perfectly safe doing so,” he said.
The president stressed that Ebola is not spread as the flu is, by way of sneezes or coughs. The virus is only spread by direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone who was infected and is exhibiting symptoms of the virus, which include a fever and vomiting.
First things first: I sincerely hope the president does not contract Ebola or anything else. Having said that, as we’ve already discussed here, his own CDC chief can’t seem to give us clear and simple information about the spread of Ebola or the government’s readiness for dealing with it. Obama is no health expert of any kind, so what sort of conceit leads him to think he is qualified to reassure us about what we can and can’t do to remain safe from an outbreak the nature of which no one really quite understands yet?
Actually that’s an easy one. The guy who thought he could make the planet heal and reverse the rise of the oceans surely trusts his own impulses enough to think he can go around laying smooches on people in a potentially compromised environment without anything going wrong for him. If there’s one thing Obama trusts, it’s Obama’s instincts - even if there is no basis whatsoever for said trust.
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man