RUSH: You know why Ron Klain’s a perfect Ebola czar? It’s precisely because he doesn’t know anything about diseases. That makes him the perfect Ebola czar. He doesn’t know anything about disease. You know what his specialty is? Ron’s specialty — I’m quoting, now — Ron Klain’s specialty is the whole of government, and especially transportation.

The reason Ron Klain is the ideal Ebola czar is because Ron Klain is a specialist in the entirety of government. And Ron Klain can go find the best medical people. And he can find the best transportation experts. And he can go out and he can find the best containment experts. And he can find the best hazmat experts. And he can coordinate all of these experts into a great functioning committee to get together and study and make recommendations, and that’s why Ron Klain is the perfect Ebola czar. And he, again, is perfect precisely because he doesn’t know anything about medicine, and precisely because he doesn’t know anything about disease.

That’s not what the job needs. No, no, no. Ebola czar? Why would anybody think that you need a disease expert in that job? That’s not what’s called for. No, no. We need somebody who knows how to spend money. We need somebody who understands how to waste money on things like Solyndra. Okay. Well, we’ve been through who Ron Klain is and it’s evidence that it’s purely a political maneuver.

Ron Klain being the Ebola czar means one thing and one thing only, and that is the Obama administration thinks they have a guy who can turn this into a winning political circumstance for them, using money, paying it, awarding it, appropriating it, what have you. That’s how they do it. They buy what they want, including votes.

Greetings, and welcome back. El Rushbo, Open Line Friday, 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.

Now, I haven’t forgotten, I mentioned to you at the top of the program in the first hour, that we actually do have an Ebola czar. We actually have somebody who serves in that role. It may not be the exact title, but there is somebody that’s been in that job for a long time. No, no, no, no. I’m not making this up. I found this at the Federalist. This is a piece by Mollie Hemingway, and it’s a long piece. The woman’s last name is Lurie, Dr. Nicole Lurie. Let me read this, pull quotes from this piece.

First off, the headline: “President Obama Already Has An Ebola Czar. Where Is She? — As the Ebola situation in West Africa continues to deteriorate, some U.S. officials are claiming that they would have been able to better deal with the public health threat if only they had more money.”

Well, that’s solved. Obama has named the number one appropriator and spender, Ron Klain. “Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told The Huffington Post, ‘Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that wouldÂ’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.’ Hillary Clinton also claimed that funding restrictions were to blame for inability to combat Ebola.”

Now, I’ve got another story here, you may have heard of it by now, all of the wasteful spending in the CDC budget and elsewhere. I mean, it’s such a baseless pathetic claim for people in a government that spends over $3 trillion a year to say they got cut, to say they got shafted on budget cuts. These people continue to insult us every day. We have a budget of $3 trillion every year, and they’re running around (crying), “They cut our budget! If we hadn’t had our budget cut, we would have a cure for Ebola by now.” What? It wasn’t a priority! Three trillion dollars, there aren’t any budget cuts. This stuff is — I don’t know, folks. Well, if you take it too literally it could drive you crazy.

I mean there were things we talked about, how much money did they spend, $3.9 million on why lesbians are obese and heterosexual women aren’t. I mean, there’s a list of expenditures here from the NIH and from the CDC that are just meaningless. They’re worthless. And yet the same people are running around (crying), “We got our budget cut! And if we hadn’t, we’d have had a cure for Ebola by now.”

So that’s how Mollie Hemingway starts her piece. “Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told The Huffington Post, ‘Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that wouldÂ’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.’ Hillary Clinton also claimed that funding restrictions were to blame for inability to combat Ebola.”

It’s always money. “Other limited government types point to the Progressive utopian foolishness seen in opposing political factions, both sides of which seem to agree humanity could somehow escape calamity if only we had a properly functioning government.” Ahhh, and that’s why Ron Klain’s so great, ’cause finally we got somebody in charge that’s gonna be a good czar. Everything that’s wrong in America is because the government’s not doing it well enough, or the government could do it better or what have you. The solution to everything, in other words, is the government, which is responsible for breaking most everything.

“WhatÂ’s particularly interesting about this discussion, then, is that nobody has even discussed the fact that the federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And sheÂ’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor,” that would be Ron Perelman at Revlon “and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.”

In other words, the woman — this is maddening. There is a woman, her name is Dr. Nicole Lurie. There is an office at Health and Human Services that was set up ten years ago, George W. Bush Regime, created and paid for a brand new office at Health and Human Services specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to things like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been nowhere to be seen since this happened.

SheÂ’s still on the job, even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of money. In other words, this department funded another project in a company with huge ties to a Democrat donor, Ron Perelman, and took money away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.

So another department set up for crony corporatism, ostensibly a division of HHS to deal with outbreaks of killer diseases, and the budget for that department was used to pad a Democrat donor and his company, and the money that was given to the Democrat donor came from grants supposedly to go to a company working on an actual cure for Ebola or a serious treatment.

The woman who heads the office is named Dr. Nicole Lurie, and there’s a video attached to this story, and in the video, Dr. Lurie “explains that the responsibilities of her office are ‘to help our country prepare for, respond to and recover from public health threats.’ She says her major priority is to help the country prepare for emergencies and to ‘have the countermeasures — the medicines or vaccines that people might need to use in a public health emergency. So a large part of my office also is responsible for developing those countermeasures.'”

She says this on a video explaining what her department does. “Or, as National Journal rather glowingly puts it, ‘LurieÂ’s job is to plan for the unthinkable. A global flu pandemic? She has a plan. A bioterror attack? SheÂ’s on it. Massive earthquake? Yep. Her responsibilities as assistant secretary span public health, global health, and homeland security.’

“A profile of Lurie quoted her as saying, ‘I have responsibility for getting the nation prepared for public health emergencies — whether naturally occurring disasters or man-made, as well as for helping it respond and recover. ItÂ’s a pretty significant undertaking.’ Still another refers to her as ‘the highest-ranking federal official in charge of preparing the nation to face such health crises as earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and pandemic influenza.’

“Now, you might be wondering why the person in charge of all this is a name youÂ’re not familiar with. Apart from a discussion of CaseyÂ’s comments [another woman mentioned in this story] on how we donÂ’t need an Ebola czar because we already have one, a Google News search for LurieÂ’s name at the time of writing brings up nothing in the last hour, the last 24 hours, not even the last week! You have to get back to mid-September for a few brief mentions of her name in minor publications. Not a single one of those links is confidence building.”

In other words, we’ve got an Ebola czar. We’ve got somebody in charge, supposedly running a department that’s supposed to mobilize because it’s ready to be mobilized for outbreaks just like this, and there hadn’t been one story about her.

Another pull quote. “The Progressive belief that a powerful government can stop all calamity is misguided. In the last 10 years we passed multiple pieces of legislation to create funding streams, offices, and management authorities precisely for this moment. That we have nothing to show for it is not good reason to put even more faith in government without learning anything from our repeated mistakes.”

This story details how in the last ten years since the creation of this department, it’s not just this department, there have been appropriations of money for projects. The recipients of those funds were to set up programs, develop vaccines, research and development into other medical things, transportation, infrastructure, everything dealing with the national outbreak of a pandemic like flu or Ebola. For the last ten years supposedly we have been paying people to devise, improvise, implement programs that could be rolled out immediately, because for the past 10 years they have been in the works, they should be ready to roll out, and nobody can find any evidence of where the money has gone.

So in the last ten years we’ve had a lot of pontificating. We haven’t seen it, but there have been multiple hearings before Congress with responsible parties sounding the alarm bell. There are rampant diseases and flus and so we need to get ready, and we need to appropriate X for this department. And as the person running that department, I assure you that what we will do is X, Y, and Z. We’ll get ready and when the outbreak happens, we’ll be ready to roll. Congress authorized the money, and who knows, it probably all went to Ron Perelman or Solyndra, but it did not go anywhere it was authorized.

We have no department ready to roll. We have no protocols. That’s why the CDC and everybody’s running around here not knowing what to do because we did have somebody there at Health and Human Services that’s supposed to be ready to rock ‘n’ roll the minute stuff like this happens. And it’s obvious they’re not ready to rock ‘n’ roll. They have nothing to show for what the money they’ve been given. So now this poor guy Frieden and the others, they’re just improvising. They thought somebody else had it handled. Nobody had it handled. Government bureaucracy. And who knows where the money went, but I guarantee you it’s in certain people’s back pockets.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Larry, Poplar Grove, Illinois. I’ve got about 45 seconds. I wanted to get you on, you were waiting, hello.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush, mega dittos. I’m a practicing hospital pharmacist. I’m also an attorney. And people can mess up an ER by walking in with Ebola symptoms. What we need is pretreatment screening centers so that as people approach a hospital they’re asked what their systems are, and if they have symptoms of Ebola they’re sent to a place, possibly a trailer in the parking lot, where they get suited up before entering the emergency room. Now, this can be a legal nightmare for hospitals and a regulatory nightmare, but if the local county governments would insist on it, if they would set up these trailers, if they would staff the trailers, make it mandatory, then the hospital is relieved of the regulatory and legal responsibility right there.

RUSH: I think this makes a lot of sense. This makes profound sense. You know, I’m gonna call the Ebola czar. Elaine Kamarck said this is his specialty, the whole of government. This is a great idea, something the Ebola czar could do.