We may not be able to hear him nightly on the radio until his non compete clause with SIRIUS expires in 2015, but that is not stopping the talk show legend from taking to the Internet to express his anger over the apparent mishandling of the Ebola situation in the United States.
Bell posted several links over the past week concerning the outbreak. The latest update from his Pahrump homestead featured a photograph of a clearly unprepared person at the airport in Dallas as an Ebola patient was loaded no an airplane to Atlanta for treatment.
Minutes later, Bell said,
It seems to me that as long as Ebola remains spread only by bodily fluids that we will survive it, I am not sure we can survive the present level of stupid. Turns out the Nurse in Ohio actually called the CDC before boarding with a fever and they said no problem…..
And he was right.
When news today was revealed that the second nurse in Dallas actually was on two airline flights over the weekend, the government seemed to initially blame her… At one point the CDC said it was the wrong thing for patient number 3 to do. But news broke late in the day that the nurse actually called the CDC and they said it was permissible for her to take the flights! The CDC said that since her fever was below 100 she was not in the category of high risk.. Hours after taking a flight from Cincinnati to Dallas, she was in an isolation ward ..
Bell’s words are right on the money.. A ‘present level of stupid.’ The problem is if the ‘stupid’ continues, the present level of reality may change.. The United States cannot afford many more stupid mistakes in the Ebola nightmare..
Tonight in an apparent attempt to save some face, President Obama addressed the nation concerning the crisis, saying that “Ebola swat teams” were prepared to respond to infections.. That term raised the eyebrows of some, with the term seemingly implying that violence against patients infected may be administered.. Instead, the nation was reassured that it simply means the CDC will be able to get to any hospital in all 50 states within 24 hours should another case pop up..
The same CDC that blamed the first nurse in Dallas, and now the same CDC that permitted a second nurse to board a flight while being in an Ebola watch group.
Art Bell is not the only former radio host who is speaking out about the latest news. Today, Matt Drudge broke his Twitter silence to post one of his first Tweets in months–after all of his others were deleted–simply saying “self quarantine.”
While Art Bell may not be heard nightly at this time, his words still register with the thousands of followers who like or comment on his semi-regular status updates. It’s notable that as of late, Bell seems to be more active on Facebook. Perhaps that is because, as any veteran listener could testify, his eyes and ears have always been on the Ebola story since the early 1990s.
Without a doubt, the high desert will be active with typed words from Bell until his voice will again be on the Dark Matter Radio Network in the late summer of 2015.
And interestingly to contemplate, but then we will know what type of story Ebola turned out to be: A scare or a culling.