Appearing on the Monday, October 10 All In with Chris Hayes, left-wing Esquire writer Charles Pierce blamed the public's fear of an Ebola outbreak in the United States on, you guessed it, George W. Bush:
CHRIS HAYES, host: There's some scary stuff out there. ISIS, monstrous and scary. Ebola, scary, doing horrible things to people in West Africa. Killed someone here. It's understandable. These are genuinely scary things, but the magnitude with which they are interpreted makes me think there is something about the American political consciousness that's looking for something to fear at all times.
CHARLES PIERCE, Esquire: I think that that's part of the conditioned reflex that was placed into the American public and into our political culture by the last administration. In which, you know, you had 9/11, then you had anthrax, then you had the snipers, then you had every bit of the government dedicated to scaring you about nuclear bombs from Iraq. You had three years of being blindsided by enormously terrible events, and then when that was done, you had a hurricane in New Orleans that the government's response to was awful, and the entire economic system collapsed what seemed like overnight.
So the ground had already been prepared by fake threats and then you got real catastrophes for which we weren't prepared, and all of that adds up to the kind of thing you're seeing now.
HAYES: Charlie Pierce, thank you.
Of course, the Bush administration did not hype the threat of the D.C. area snipers nor scaremonger about anthrax. That was all the work of the sensationalist national media, but why let facts like that get in the way of a blame-Bush narrative? It's also entirely risible that Pierce and his fellow travelers in the liberal media would not be gleefully and repeatedly hammering a Republican president for mishandling Ebola, particularly if the current crisis were occurring in the 2006 midterm election year, when Democrats and the media were hammering home the meme that the Bush administration was hopeless incompetent following Iraq and Katrina.
But George W. Bush wasn't the only center-right figure which Pierce smeared tonight. At the beginning of the segment, Pierce angrily denounced moderately conservative columnist George Will as an "Ebola truther" for his comment on Sunday that some doctors believe it is possible that you can get infected with the disease from an infected patient nearby sneezing:
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HAYES: Can we start with George Will spouting absolutely irresponsible nonsense, which, again as Dr. Hebert said was sort of walked back by the source that he attempted to cite? You know, on national television, this is the great intellectual of the Right, this is the person we're supposed to take seriously. My jaw was on the floor when I saw this clip.
PIERCE: At some point in the last five years, George Will was taken over by the spirit of Alex Jones.
[Hayes chuckles]
PIERCE: Because, not only, I mean, his initial, you know, foray into crazy land was when he became a climate-change denialist. Now he's an Ebola truther. I mean the FEMA camps are not far down the road, I'm tellin' ya.
