And now the bad news about the tea party: [icopyright one button toolbar]
They don’t lose when they lose. They bounce back and make even more trouble. They’ve become the common cold of our politics, the relentless pain in once-healthy joints, the anomalies found in our blood tests.
The Tea Party wins when it wins, and it wins when it loses. Five years after it began and long after many people (myself included) thought it would fade away, it continues to hold the GOP in its grip. For a bunch of nincompoops prancing around in tricorner hats, it’s quite a remarkable achievement. …PaulWaldman,WaPo
They’ve set themselves up with a no-lose strategy.
A win strengthens it by showing its members that victories are possible if they fight hard enough. And because the movement has organized itself around the idea of establishment Republican betrayal, its losses only further prove that it’s doing the right thing. Furthermore, if ordinary Republicans have to become Tea Partiers to beat Tea Partiers (even if only for a while), the movement’s influence is greater, not less. ...PaulWaldman,WaPo
Waldman admits that though he once thought they were goners, he now believes they’re here to stay. America’s own ebola virus.
The difference is, we’re sufficiently scared now about ebola to do something about it. Eradicating ebola isn’t impossible. It just takes a lot of effort and money. And focus. The current outbreak has reached such dimensions that we’ve begun to understand it’s no longer the problem of unknown people in a far-off country in Africa. It’s spreadable. It could come here.
So — finally! — we’ve begun to do something about vaccines.
More than four years ago, a team of U.S. government scientists developed vaccine candidates that shielded monkeys from multiple strains of Ebola. Those vaccines, however, were never tested in human clinical trials — and not because the science wasn’t promising. One small trial on the monkeys, for example, had a 100 percent success rate of protecting the animals from the disease.
The factor preventing such trials in humans, though, has been cost, said Dr. Daniel Bausch, an associate professor of tropical medicine at the Tulane University School of Public Health who is currently stationed at the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit 6 in Lima, Peru.
That’s because, while the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. government often fund the early animal safety and efficacy testing of a vaccine, pharmaceutical companies typically fund the human clinical trials to take a drug or vaccine to market.
“When you have a population or situation with Ebola where it only sporadically occurs, and it occurs really in the world’s poorest populations, it’s not exactly an attractive candidate for the pharmaceutical industry on the economic side,” Bausch said. ...AlJazeera
More attractive, though when developed countries feel the threat.
If only we had a similar vaccine against the incivility and ignorance of the tea party. They’re our own killer virus, wearing a tricorne and with the manners of a thug, and with no plans to go away any time soon.
Cross-posted from Prairie Weather
graphic via shutterstock.com