Ebola Fact

[Scuba]

[marym625]

1. This is perfect

I have been thinking about this since the first criticism. So many people died and NO ONE in government cared.

[FSogol]

2. K & R. n/t

[underpants]

3. He hasn't done anything!! He's done too much!!

He is using to control Murka!!!

Repeat cycle starting on day 4

[Peacetrain]

4. So true..

[Fred Sanders]

5. The major media are greedy fucks and asshole racists? It is the media telling us "Obama is a failure"

constantly, evidence to the contrary be damned, evidence possiblly supporting "failure" , which will be defined as widely as possible, including eating the wrong mustard, shouted to the skies and repeated endlessly...it is almost like the American mass media was an illegal monopoly. How can several independent news sources all shout the same words at exactly the same time all the time?

Either the major media is a coordinated monopoly or I am seeing things. Again.

Either way, the major media are greedy fucks and asshole racists.

[ReRe]

6. K&R

It's a fact. Dead on, Scuba.

[IDemo]

7. Reagan and his staff didn't just ignore it

They chuckled about it.

[eggplant]

9. Well, thanks for that.

And I thought my day couldn't get shittier. (I lived through that time and didn't remember this. Ugh.)

[AndyTiedye]

39. I Remember That

[marble falls]

8. My thought exactly.

[ctsnowman]

10. Exactly!

[mountain grammy]

11. Ronald Reagan's legacy is America's curse..

how many friends did we all lose thanks to an administration that preached "just say no?

I saw a good one here yesterday; Reagan put us on a fast train to Banana Republicanstan!

[RiffRandell]

12. K&R!

Excellent, Scuba!

[Atman]

13. "It's Morning In America!"

"Now get off my lawn, you fucking worthless groundlings!"

[berni_mccoy]

14. Indeed. People forget and need to be reminded.

[SheilaT]

15. Too bad we can't afford to

buy billboards with this message.

[LynneSin]

16. Well technically it was about 20,849......

seconds

Which is 0.24119213 of a day or 5.78861112 hours for a response time with Obama so perhaps there was something in common with Reagan and Obama and perhaps Obama could have been quicker than 5.78861112 hours for his response time which is like Reagan's 20,849 days except for it's 20,849 seconds.

Ok well I give up but I tried.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

17. Weird.

I had always hoped to vote for a president who was smarter than Reagan.

[valerief]

18. Ebola has been around for a lot of U.S. presidents so far.

And lots more other world leaders.

[ffr]

19. Reagan's AIDS Legacy / Silence equals death. SFGATE.COM

...By Feb. 1, 1983, 1,025 AIDS cases were reported, and at least 394 had died in the United States. Reagan said nothing. On April 23, 1984, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced 4,177 reported cases in America and 1,807 deaths. In San Francisco, the health department reported more than 500 cases. Again, Reagan said nothing.

<snip>
"It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals."

Reagan would ultimately address the issue of AIDS while president. His remarks came May 31, 1987 (near the end of his second term), at the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington. When he spoke, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died. The disease had spread to 113 countries, with more than 50,000 cases... SFGATE.COM

To be fair to Regan's way of thinking, I doubt any of the 36,058 Americans diagnosed with AIDS would have voted for a Republis anyway. I'd have to imagine then that they didn't matter to him.

[AndyTiedye]

40. Reagan and His Lot Thought Aids Was Just Peachy, Until…

…Rock Hudson succumbed to it.

[deutsey]

20. While true, this type of thing never penetrates the consciousness

of those outside the reality-based community.

[GummyBearz]

21. But..

But so many on this site keep saying that ebola is nothing to panic about, just like AIDs was nothing to panic about in the early 80's

[Scuba]

22. I agree...

... that panic is not the appropriate response.

[GummyBearz]

24. Good thing

That Reagan didn't panic back in the 80's then. I guess Obama could learn from that example?

[Scuba]

25. There's miles of difference between a thoughtful response and panic.

[Skittles]

30. WTF?

REAGAN DID NOT REACT BECAUSE HE DID NOT CARE ABOUT GAY FOLK

wouldn't you feel more at home at the Freak, er I mean FREE Republic?

[GummyBearz]

31. Sorry,

Maybe my sarcasm was lost in translation, so I'll just say it plain and simple

AIDs was worth "panicking" over back in the early 80's, and it was a total travesty that Reagan didn't hit the "panic button" to stop it sooner. Ebola could go the same way, so yes I think we need to be damn worried about it when 2 people catch it, instead of when 20,000 people catch it.

[Skittles]

33. sorry, you are correct

except I think global action should have been taken to prevent the tragedy in Africa

[geek tragedy]

28. Do you understand the difference between avoiding panic and

doing nothing?

[DrBulldog]

23. I was teaching high-school math to adults in a community college in 1986 ...

... which was several years after the outbreak of AIDS in this country. At the time, Reagan had not yet even spoken the word "AIDS" in public! I showed the students how an uncontrolled and untreated epidemic disease will spread as an exponential function in a population to stress to them the incredible powerful growth of such mathematical functions. I asked them to take the current numbers of AIDS deaths at the time and using such an exponential function (with very conservative parameters) to predict the number of deaths in the new few years (e.g. 1987, 1988, ...). When we computed the numbers (in the hundreds of thousands!), the entire class gasped. Then I said to them: "So why has our President completely ignored this disease?" They all looked at each other, completely stunned ... finally realizing fully the ultimate homophobic bigotry of Ronald Reagan.

[Moonwalk]

26. Back then 20,849 gay lives were equal to about 3 heterosexual lives....

I mean, let's not forget that. Ronnie didn't pay attention to AIDs until straight men and women were dying from it. Too bad for him that the "gay disease" wasn't about sexual orientation at all, as so many insisted it was. If it had been he would probably have never responded to it.

[Electric Monk]

27. k&r

[Warpy]

29. Excellent

I will never forgive Reagan for teaching me how to hate, and I have a seething hatred for the man years after he's been worm food.

I think it's probably shared by every big city nurse working in the mid 80s, when we'd admit young men at the beginning of a shift and have to call the morgue by the end of it. That's what that bastard's callous indifference did. It is unforgivable.

[bearssoapbox]

32. The difference is black and white.

That is why, in their eyes, President Obama will always be 'inadequate'.

The rethugs and teabaggers have worked to undermine and minimize President Obama since he was elected, and before. Almost from the time he announced he was running for president.

It hasn't made a difference to them how much their actions have hurt, or will hurt, the country just so long as it negatively impacts President Obama.

He could announce a cure for Ebola tomorrow and they would turn it so Obama would look bad.

That's all they've done since he's been in office.

This is just my opinion based on the actions of rethugs and other right wing groups and people over the past few years.

I just worried how far they are willing to go.

[Scuba]

34. It's not just your opinion, and I do not doubt that they'd sink the country over it.

[Enthusiast]

35. Kicked and recommended a whole bunch!

Thanks, Scuba!

[cer7711]

37. How True!

There are legitimate criticisms one can make of President Obama.

THIS isn't one of them!

Nice job, Scuba! Compare and contrast, as the English teachers say . . .

[YOHABLO]

38. There will be a strong urgency to get a vaccine .. since it's not homosexual related.

[TomCADem]

41. I Remember The Blame It On Gays Media Crusade

The media at the time was running with stories that you can't 100% rule out that you can't get AIDS from toilet seats. AIDS was given as a reason to avoid associating with gay men because you could not 100% rule out that you can't AIDS from casual contact. You just can't be too sure. The same arguments are now being made with respect to Ebola.

[Warren DeMontague]

42. I don't think Reagan's morally reprehensible inaction on AIDS is any sort of a yardstick to compare

the behavior of ANY president I would ever hope to support, against.

I mean, if that's the standard one is trying to beat, the bar one is supposed to clear.... sorry, no.

As far as ebola- and no, I don't think it's "Obama's fault"- the fact is they've been telling us for 3 fucking months how incredibly ready we are for ebola in fact we're so ready for ebola ebola won't know what hit it that's how totally completely and utterly ready for ebola we are.... and then ebola gets here and guess what? We weren't fucking ready, not by a long shot.

Add to that the tantrums that have been reflexively had in response to completely sensible proposals to temporarily restrict visa entry from the epicenter of the outbreak, which Alan Grayson was suggesting months before FOX news ever heard of "ebola".... I'm not the only one who has noticed that it has taken them over a week to settle on why, exactly, a travel ban is such a bad idea... (aside from the fact that "the experts" all apparently "say it is&quot

... first, a travel ban was unworkable, or we couldn't seal off Africa or stop all flights or do other things no one was suggesting... then restricting travel would keep supplies and help from going in, because US citizens wouldn't be able to come back, until people mentioned that no, citizens would still be able to come back even if visa holders from those countries were temporarily restricted.

...then it was mean, it would stigmatize the countries subject to it, it would destabilize those countries, it would harm their economies (not to let a handful of visa travelers vacation in the US) ... now, apparently the justification is that some people might lie about where they were coming from, although how someone who obtained a travel visa from liberia is then going to lie and be able to fly into this country without that liberian travel visa, is still unclear. As I've mentioned elsewhere, we spend billions of dollars on customs to make sure people don't bring cuban cigars or, heaven forfend, hash from Amsterdam, into this country. But checking visas is apparently not just draconian but also an unworkable logistical challenge.

Shit, when asked about the 90 or so other countries that HAVE restricted entry to citizens of L/SL/G, Frieden said he wasn't even aware of it. This is the guy who positions himself as one of the "experts" on the geopolitical impact of any US travel ban.

No, this isn't Reagan and AIDS. But it undeniably has been handled badly, so far. Blame is immaterial, but maybe the next step would be to stop demonizing the 70% of Americans who want to put travel restrictions in place, stop trying to imply that anyone who is concerned about this thing doesn't understand viruses and science, and recognize that yeah maybe we better take this shit seriously.

[colsohlibgal]

43. We Have Not Handled It Well So Far (Thanks Texas) but Reagan Was Another Thing

I think Ronnie saw who it was killing - gay people, people from Haiti, and drug users - and thought good enough. Had it affected white bloated republicans the "Gipper" would have been on it like white on rice.

[Bluenorthwest]

44. This can not be said often enough.

Yet again I'd like to recommend to DU the HBO film version of Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart', the play that first screamed about the AIDS crisis early on. Larry Kramer later founded ACT UP, and this film is about activism, about love and about all the contagious aspects of a public health crisis. Nothing could be more informative of our current times. The cast is amazing, Mark Ruffalo, Jim Parsons, Alfred Molina, Julia Roberts....
http://www.hbo.com/movies/the-normal-heart#/