Ebola And ISIS: This Year’s October Surprises
Posted on October 8, 2014
"Ebola virus virion" by CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith - Public Health Image Library, #10816
This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library (PHIL), with identification number #10816. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
What do the American people really care about?
Obamacare?
Taxes?
Federal spending?
Minimum wage? Income inequality? Social security? Jobs?
The midterm elections? (That was a joke by the way. Nobody cares about the midterm elections, except for the candidates and their extended families)
None of the above.
The American people care only about ISIS and Ebola.
I betcha if you did some sort of quantitative survey, the number one and two stories that inquiring minds click on has to do with the newest terrorist threat coming from the Middle East and the newest version of the Black Plague coming from Africa.
ISIS and Ebola dominate the headlines, kind of like Notre Dame has dominated the Naval Academy in football over the last 6 decades.
In the Age of Anxiety, the average American believes the worst about these two threats.
Some conservatives believe that Ebola is flying over the border and think that the President is allowing this to happen to undermine America.
Louis Farrakhan thinks that Ebola is a white man’s plot to kill black people.
The ISIS beheading of a couple of journalists has crystallized the threat of Muslim extremism more than any other single event in the last five years.
It has even inspired a debate on Real Time with Bill Maher.
Maher thinks that the bombing campaign is counter-productive but thinks that the threat of Islamic extremism is not taken seriously by liberals.
Ben Affleck, the mouthpiece of the liberals, basically thinks that the HBO comedian is a racist and called him out on his show.
The bigger point is that ISIS has attracted the attention of Hollywood, Main Street and Peoria perhaps more than anything other than Ebola.
These are our twin October surprises.
The President’s largely ineffective responses to both have battered his approval ratings and made it harder for Democrats to swim away from his sinking ship.
It’s so bad that Leon Panetta, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, Hillary Clinton and a host of others are taking pot-shots not at John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, but at the President himself.
None of this bodes very well for the President’s party when the election rolls around next month.
And lest you forget, there’s an election next month.