Second Health-Care Worker in Dallas Contracts Ebola

Today on NRO

JONAH GOLDBERG: Ebola is much less scary than a 2011 Hollywood medical thriller. Or is it? A Real-Life Contagion?

CHARLES C.W. COOKE: Jettisoning due process for those accused of rape is a small price to pay for social change. The Illiberal Ezra Klein.

RYAN LOVELACE: Candidates are winning by defying the RNC on illegal immigration. Republicans against Amnesty.

RICHARD BROOKHISER: Lincoln continued Washington’s fight. A New Birth.

SLIDESHOW: Ebola Budget Battle.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

October 15, 2014

Second Health-Care Worker in Dallas Contracts Ebola

Urgh.

A second person involved in the care of Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan has contracted the disease, the Texas Department of State Health Services said in a statement early Wednesday.

The health-care worker, who wasn't identified, reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

The statement said a preliminary Ebola test was conducted late Tuesday at a state public health lab in Austin.

A test to confirm the result will be conducted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Expect to hear a LOT about stopping flights and more intense screenings at airports in the final few weeks of the midterm campaigns.

The Coming Attempt to Persuade You that You Really Like Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton is already making a preemptive strike against any critical media coverage in the coming years:

Hillary Clinton, eyeing a second presidential bid and constantly at the center of intense press coverage, lamented Tuesday that modern media scrutiny has made it more difficult to be a leader today.

“We have created very difficult hurdles for people who want to serve, who believe they can lead, to do be able to do so. And the media has intensified that,” the former secretary of state said at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, sponsored by the tech company Salesforce.

Clinton said she had watched Ken Burns’ documentary on the Roosevelt family, noting that reporters kept hidden Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s handicap. Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio at age 39 in 1921 and was largely confined to a wheelchair as president.

“Instead of, in a democracy, doing what we should to be doing, which is giving people information so they can be decision makers,” Clinton said reporters today are only interested in “the best angle, quickest hit, the biggest embarrassment.”

@Drawandstrike offers a series of Tweets, preparing us for the two years of the media “build[ing] Hillary up into the Awesome Special Champion You Can Trust With Ever-Growing Government Power.”

Every presidential campaign tries to build a heroic narrative around the life story of their candidate. Sometimes the material is there — think John McCain enduring the years of torture as a POW in Vietnam, and not coming out embittered or enraged or broken with despair. Sometimes the campaign has to stretch. I tried to lay out a heroic narrative for Mitt Romney back in August 2012; I think his campaign really didn’t try particularly hard in this area, other than some portions of his convention speech. (He was a young barefoot street-brawling vigilante who later in life gave away his inheritance, physically grabbed state officials who tried to skip out on hearings after accidents, and rescued drowning people on his jet ski. He’s Ward Cleaver crossed with Bruce Wayne.)

The media tends to do this in a rather ham-handed way. Sometimes it comes in cookie-cutter “this Democrat in a red state smashes all the stereotypes” profiles. Sometimes it comes in increasingly heavy-handed attempts to persuade you that the offspring of the Chosen Messiah Candidate is particularly special and admirable:

That particular cover story in Fast Company tried to dance around its obvious mission of glamorizing a young woman whose adult life consists mostly of stepping through doors opened by her parents’ power and meandering through the highest levels of high society without actually doing much.

Over on NRO this morning, I look at the intensely depressed national mood and point out that the country could use someone with a bit of a heroic shine these days.

Have the Comedy World and Pop Culture Moved On from Saturday Night Live?

Christian Toto compiles “5 Reasons ‘Saturday Night Live’ No Longer Matters.” He hits this obvious point . . .

In the 1990s Phil Hartman’s Bill Clinton was reason enough to tune in every week. The same held true for Dana Carvey’s President Bush. Will Ferrell’s take on Dubya proved equally memorable, its cutting humor served up with boyish charm. That bipartisan tradition evaporated when President Barack Obama came into office. At first, Fred Armisen offered up a tentative Obama portrait, a sheepish attempt to keep politics in the mix. Later, Jay Pharoah delivered a more nuanced impression, but the writers refused to play along. Like the rest of the comedy world, “SNL” made the decision to protect, not tweak, the president’s image. Audiences took notice. They no longer consider the show the signature source for political humor.

Lest this be construed as predictable conservative whining, Mollie Hemingway watched the season opener so the rest of us wouldn’t have to, and she summarizes the show’s current thinking of what constitutes political humor:

The Weekend Update crew joined with Kenan Thompson to give President Obama a pep talk. A pep talk. Not an are-you-freaking-kidding-me-you-are-a-bad-president evisceration. But a pep talk. A pep talk that — and again, I’m totally serious here — went after President George W. Bush, who left office so long ago that it was from an era when comedy shows knew how to make fun of presidents.

My husband and I looked at each other with confusion and disgust as the Weekend Update crowd told President Obama to cheer up and that things would get better. There were lines like, “Benghazi used to be a huge deal, now it’s just John McCain’s safe word,” and suggestions that he go on the road with the real first family, Beyonce and Jay-Z. Jost said that Bush had wrecked the economy, bombed every country with sand and that all he had to do was paint one ok picture of a dog to get back in the country’s good graces. Ha ha! All so funny and fresh!

But on a broader point, it feels like Saturday Night Live doesn’t do nearly as much topical comedy as during the late 80s–early 90s golden years. A lot of it feels like cast members saying “Look, I’ve created this annoying character who’s so annoying he’s hilarious!” The show always had a mix of news or current-events based humor and evergreen sketches and comedy, but it seems strange to have a live television show and not make the material seem very fresh. Or has the instantaneous snarking on Twitter pre-mocked every news event by Saturday night?

To prepare for a coming trip to Portland, I’ve been watching the IFC sketch comedy series Portlandia. It has more funny concepts than genuinely funny sketches. For example, two store owners are convinced that putting a bird on something automatically makes it art — and promptly put it on every object imaginable. All is well until an actual bird gets into the store, and the pair freak out and panic, accidentally smashing all their merchandise as they desperately try to get the bird out of the store. You can see it as a bit of poking at armchair environmentalists who don’t actually like nature.

The recurring “Feminist Bookstore” sketch depicts two feminist bookstore owners who are so determined to strike out at any perceived slight or expression of patriarchy that they chase every customer out of the store. I’ve mentioned the recycling gone amok sketch, where Portland residents are reminded to sort their trash into increasingly-more-specific recycling bins. This isn’t a conservative show, but it does mock, with affection, the green, crunchy, oh-so-precious Portland lifestyle.

This little anecdote about comedy-writer Jack Handley explains what we’re dealing with when it comes to a show like Portlandia:

Maria Semple, a writer for “S.N.L.” and “Arrested Development” and the author of the novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” spent a long time on the phone with me trying to explain what it is about Handey’s comedy that makes him different from almost anyone else writing comedy today. “In the rewrite room,” she finally said, “we used to say, ‘It smells like a joke.’ That’s the scourge of comedy these days. It smells like a joke, but there’s no actual joke there. I’m not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone’s laughing, and then you shake it out and you realize, ‘There’s no joke there!’” But in Handey’s novel, she said, “I don’t think four lines go by without a killer joke. These are real jokes, man. They don’t just smell like jokes.”

ADDENDA: I’m scheduled to appear on Greta’s panel this evening.

Finally, somebody call Batman.

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