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Kaci Hickox, Self-Absorbed Hero
Townhall.com ^ | 10-30-2014 | Mark Davis

Posted on 10/30/2014 2:14:32 AM PDT by servo1969

There is something uniquely jarring about a display of selfish insolence from someone who is so praiseworthy in other respects. Maddening traits usually come from maddening people, as their true character surfaces.

But the insults delivered to a concerned nation by heroic nurse Kaci Hickox are particularly hard to absorb, because the proper reaction of revulsion does not mix well with the sentiments we would like to be sending her way.

Those sentiments would be: We are so glad you are home safely, we pray for you to remain symptom-free, and most of all, we honor you for the courage you displayed in deploying to West Africa to help fight Ebola.

I’m sure the nation harbors exactly those attitudes about Ms. Hickox, but our outgoing warm thoughts have been doused by the waves of complaining she has treated us to since setting foot back on American soil.

Granted, her first days back in the U.S. were in a makeshift tent none of us would have enjoyed. Returning Ebola-fighters deserve better than to poop in a box.

But America deserves better than the haughty scolding she has issued since leaving New Jersey for Maine. From her home state, she now informs us she has no intention of obeying limits placed on her for reasons of public safety. She will not be “bullied by politicians,” she says, weaving details of how her reaction to inconvenience has grown from shock to anger.

If Ms. Hickox wishes to see what anger looks like, she should visit Twitter. The country isn’t enjoying her griping. She showed selfless devotion to her fellow man in going to Sierra Leone. That attribute did not make it back through customs.

Instead, we get lawsuit threats and the same kind of snotty condescension that has us loving the CDC so much right now. On a tour of network news shows Wednesday morning, Ms. Hickox demanded that an undereducated America worship at the altar of the “science” that she invokes to argue for her immediate release from the constraints of public safety. She brandishes her absence of symptoms in an attempt to escape a 21-day time-out that would provide substantial reassurance to a public rocked not just by Ebola but by the rank ineptitude of government in responding to it.

We are thrilled that she feels “absolutely great,” as she told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” We would feel great as well if she were to accept a sensible quarantine as a result of close proximity to people with a deadly disease. But while Ms. Hickox worked hard to help Ebola patients feel better, she has only contempt for her fellow Mainers and other Americans who are wholly entitled to wonder if the elites know all they think they know about a disease that is fairly recent and until now foreign to our shores.

But relax, you stupid people, she tells us, invoking the willfully ignorant claim that the “science” does not support quarantines.

Ms. Hickox and anyone similarly misguided should know that quarantines are not solely matters of science. They are matters of policy and pragmatism based on what we know from science and what we may not know.

We do not know when within the 21 days an exposed person may become symptomatic. Shall we allow Ms. Hickox to bowl and dine out until the moment her fever spikes? And when it does, are we to believe that she is only contagious at that exact moment, having posed no risk five seconds earlier?

We are in for some ugliness if this woman who deserves so much credit plows forward with behavior that will earn substantial and deserved scorn. Maine’s Republican Governor stood firm Wednesday, invoking his responsibility to place the health of citizens above the convenience of nurses fresh back from the Ebola Zone. How long before the White House roughs him up for listening to citizens instead of the latest Obama preaching?

It is the President, in fact, who has delivered the meanest slap to Ms. Hickox’s profession, suggesting that health care workers will balk at trips to West Africa is quarantine awaits them upon their return. This is an attack on doctors, nurses and logic. The true calling to venture into that cauldron should not be extinguished by the prospect of three weeks of web-surfing and pizza deliveries.

Self-quarantines do not work. Actual doctors— some of them with press passes— have returned to America unable to restrain themselves from gallavanting among us.

Are we to be treated to a parade of whining caregivers who leave their posts in the Ebola zone only to return with armies of lawyers waiting to assert their “right” to put us at risk?

Let us stipulate that Ms. Hickox poses very little risk to her little Maine Hamlet and the nation of 320 million that lies beyond. But we do things every day to reduce even tiny risks. We build storm shelters to address the tiny risk of tornadoes. We warn our kids against the tiny risk of abduction.

Ms. Hickox’s petulant reaction to a very minor inconvenience launches an entire question of the mindset of some health care workers. If these folks are indeed over there because they care about the health of fellow human beings, how does that vanish during the journey home?

This repellent attitude threatens to color our image of the motivation for going in the first place. Is it an exotic adventure? Is it a salve for liberal white guilt? Is it a story to tell at cocktail parties?

That sounds deeply dismissive, but Ms. Hickox’s bellyaching does not call to mind the caring accommodation one usually associates with health care workers.

And while I do not attach politics to everything, I will make anyone a bet: not one conservative health care worker will return home fussing and moaning about a 21-day quarantine.

Whatever her motivations, Ms. Hickox should know three things: She is draping her proud profession in a cloak of dark public disapproval, she is alienating the good people living around her who would otherwise be planning parties in her honor, and perhaps most urgently in view of her own priorities, if she goes to court, she will lose.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: ebola; hickox; kaci; mememe; obama
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To: servo1969

41 posted on 10/30/2014 5:55:39 AM PDT by RightGeek (FUBO and the donkey you rode in on)
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To: servo1969

But is she anymore risky than the nurses and doctors treating the doctor in NYC? I would bet that some of them are NJ residents who may be travelling back and forth to NJ on a daily basis. Why hasn’t Christie demanded that they be quarantined?


42 posted on 10/30/2014 5:57:42 AM PDT by oincobx
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To: servo1969
Even the majority of liberals I know consider her a selfish arrogant grandstanding jackass. Has she been on with Jon Stewart, sharing some snark, yet?

Get some books, wear your pajamas and sip hot cocoa for a couple weeks, asshead.

43 posted on 10/30/2014 5:57:57 AM PDT by dead (I've got my eye out for Mullah Omar.)
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To: dead

This media-freak whiner is a typical LIB asshat. She should be exiled for the good of the country. We have too many asshats here as it is. Her “boyfriend” must be a fool with low self-esteem and a need to pamper a high-maintenance LIB moonbat.


44 posted on 10/30/2014 5:58:45 AM PDT by hal ogen (First Amendment or Reeducation Camp?)
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To: dead

This is the the Kind I suffered during grad school .... Self serving, all-knowing, sanctimonious liberal hags .... They are abundant in the health care professions.... Believe me — if it isn’t “evidence- based” we don’t believe it ....

There is evidence, and there is also old fashioned common sense .... Something that our lib schools are drilling out of students year after year in our so called institutions of higher learning.


45 posted on 10/30/2014 6:03:32 AM PDT by LibsRJerks
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To: Ann Archy

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/nyregion/nurse-in-newark-tests-negative-for-ebola.html?_r=0

“...Kaci Hickox grew up in Texas and worked for the C.D.C. in Las Vegas until recently, when she moved to Fort Kent, Maine, her mother said. She has worked in several African countries with Doctors Without Borders.

In the essay, Ms. Hickox described her last night at an Ebola management center in Sierra Leone, when she gave crushed Tylenol and anti-seizure medicine to a dying 10-year-old girl as her body jolted in bed. “It was the hardest night of my life,” she wrote....”


46 posted on 10/30/2014 6:05:40 AM PDT by Help!
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To: Ann Archy
She went there from the CDC, her employer, on a FACT FINDING MISSION.......not sure she even aided Ebola patients.

I suspect she may have been chosen for this quarantine malcontent mission specifically because she was never at any risk of exposure to ebola over there.

The plan was for politicians on the right to express that "panic" that they keep telling us we're all having, while she calmly and cooly explains to us why the Obama Administration is correct in their strategy of doing nothing. Then, when she's healthy and chatting on Oprah or the Daily Show about the horrible mistreatment she received from those on the right, we'd all have egg on our faces about our irrational fears.

They miscalculated about a number of things though. First of all, nobody's panicking about her, just exhibiting common sense about disease containment. Secondly, even many liberals understand that you don't run around public places after you've been exposed to a deadly disease. Third, they didn't properly vet her likeability, which is hovering somewhere near zero. She's radiates asshole waves like a supernova.

47 posted on 10/30/2014 6:07:47 AM PDT by dead (I've got my eye out for Mullah Omar.)
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To: oincobx
But is she anymore risky than the nurses and doctors treating the doctor in NYC?

If she was actively treating ebola patients in Africa she would be in a higher risk category according to CDC guidelines. From what I've read at CDC, US healthcare workers who treat ebola patients don't have many restrictions unless there is breach at their facility.

48 posted on 10/30/2014 6:14:45 AM PDT by EVO X
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To: dead

“I suspect she may have been chosen for this quarantine malcontent mission”

Our behind the scene Ebola czar, doing his job. This is so obvious, the passive-aggressive president once again, swims upstream against the American people.


49 posted on 10/30/2014 6:18:44 AM PDT by Toespi
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To: oincobx

“But is she anymore risky than the nurses and doctors treating the doctor in NYC?”

Yes

“Why hasn’t Christie demanded that they be quarantined?”

good question

The rule should be: Quarantines for non level 4 facilities
IMO


50 posted on 10/30/2014 6:40:22 AM PDT by Selene
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To: servo1969
This woman is a paid employee who is not in any way suffering from a few inconveniences that are temporary and in place to protect others than just herself. I see her attitude of specialness as typical of a good many federal workers now attached to the royal regime that has taken over the US government. This Kaci is especially obnoxious and any Republican who bends to accommodate her in any way deserves high criticism.
51 posted on 10/30/2014 6:49:00 AM PDT by mountainfolk (God bless the Republic of the United States of America)
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To: servo1969

I would wager a large of sum of money she already has her book or speaking tour in the works.
She is doing this to cash in.


52 posted on 10/30/2014 6:52:15 AM PDT by HereInTheHeartland (Obama lied; our healthcare died.)
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To: HereInTheHeartland
She is doing this to cash in.

I have no doubt that was part of her plan, but it's a colossal fail. Even most liberals think she's an arrogant selfish ass.

53 posted on 10/30/2014 7:09:58 AM PDT by dead (I've got my eye out for Mullah Omar.)
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To: LibsRJerks

Must be why I have had a hard time with most female doctors


54 posted on 10/30/2014 7:10:58 AM PDT by goodnesswins (R.I.P. Doherty, Smith, Stevens, Woods)
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To: 2ndreconmarine; Fitzcarraldo; Covenantor; Mother Abigail; EBH; Dog Gone; ...
Ping...

A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread

55 posted on 10/30/2014 10:05:51 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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To: servo1969
(title):" Kaci Hickox, Self-Absorbed Hero "

Some may regard her as 'hero', including in her own mind
But to me ,she is "Typhoid Mary", Narcissist extrodinaire
since she puts herself before her concern for others.
She chose to go to Africa to help build her resumee, but gives no consideration to the community where she is staying as a visitor .
She put her wants before the communities need to be free from risk of disease, and is playing political football on behalf of her employer and the administration .
She is the Sandra Fluke of Ebola , and an attention whore.

56 posted on 10/30/2014 12:17:14 PM PDT by Tilted Irish Kilt
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To: servo1969
What if she becomes symptomatic after she's had contact with others and passes it on to them? Even if nobody dies from it, she'll be beggared by the multiple lawsuits.

Her "it's all about ME" attitude may come back to bite her.

57 posted on 10/30/2014 12:17:23 PM PDT by Kenton
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To: servo1969; neverdem; ProtectOurFreedom; Mother Abigail; EBH; vetvetdoug; Smokin' Joe; Global2010; ..
"But the insults delivered to a concerned nation by heroic nurse Kaci Hickox are particularly hard to absorb, because the proper reaction of revulsion does not mix well with the sentiments we would like to be sending her way."

Speak for yourself, Mark.

I learned a long time ago that a person's personality is revealed by their actions after the pious deed they use hide behind.

A month taking notes in Africa does not buy enough credit to cavalierly risk genocide on America, just because staying away from people for a few weeks is a drag.


Bring out your dead! The Dark Man cometh! Bring out your dead! The Dark Man cometh! Bring out your......

(Since all records of obama's past were lost in a tragic boating accident and fire, no one can be certain that the guy in the red circle isn't him...)

Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.

The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.

So far the false positive rate is 100%.

At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.

*sigh* Such is life, and death...

58 posted on 10/30/2014 6:37:55 PM PDT by null and void (And I think Kevin Bacon is doomed.)
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To: servo1969; null and void; Kartographer; 3D-JOY; abner; Abundy; AGreatPer; Albion Wilde; ...

If she gets sick, she shall be forevermore known as . . .

THE FACE OF EBOLA!!!

PING!


59 posted on 10/30/2014 7:01:52 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (The mods stole my tagline.)
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

Yup.

Kaka, you ignorant slut.

Regieme plant.

Yup, it’s intentional.

Two more ebola bound intentionals wandering the neighborhood, here in Cottonwood Heights, Utah. Screw Manhattan, Obola’s infesting any and all of America with this vermin.

Level 4 biopathogens, in your neighborhood.

This is intentional.


60 posted on 10/30/2014 7:40:49 PM PDT by glock rocks (Whenever I find myself in a conumdrum, I ask myself: What would Elvis do?)
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