Fox News host Greg Gutfeld on Monday called out one of his fellow network personalities for pointing the finger at President Barack Obama over the Ebola virus reaching the United States.
The hosts of “The Five” were discussing an attack ad from a progressive group that strongly implied prominent Republicans who called for spending cuts to emergency public health funding were responsible for Ebola deaths.
“This is ideology as a sport … as the leftists blame [Texas Gov.] Rick Perry and the sequester, the right also blames Obama for spreading Ebola,” Gutfeld observed. “We had somebody on this very network who said that, his name rhymes with Ablow, right, Keith Ablow? Different sides of the same coin. We are both guilty of this, and we should probably avoid blaming people for tragedy.”
Ablow, the same Fox analyst who suggested this summer that the FIFA World Cup was a way for the President to “distract people” from the problems facing America, said last week that Obama wanted to keep U.S. borders open so that Americans may “suffer along with less fortunate nations” stricken by the deadly virus.
Calling out Ablow’s politicization of Ebola was the extent of Gutfeld’s goodwill, however. He argued that the left has deftly politicized natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the rise of the Islamic State as the fault of climate change skeptics and GOP policy in the Middle East, respectively.
“The left always has a tendency to blame people for things that are often out of our control, and that’s wrong,” he added. “But blaming budget cuts [for Ebola], it’s absurd and it’s disrespectful to the taxpayers who have to hand over billions of dollars to the NIH, who then see a tiny percentage of that money go into building facilities when it goes to god knows what else.”
Overall, Fox News has taken quite a bit of flak from the science community in recent weeks for its coverage of the Ebola outbreak.
