Demagoguery 101

Demagoguery is political speech in which the speaker promotes himself by preying on the hatred and fear--largely the same thing--of generally uninformed people.

Responsible and principled political leaders seek to inform. They urge reason and calm.

Demagogues, on the other hand, behave as living, breathing exclamation points.

So a demagogue would find it nigh unto impossible not to stoke the fires of fear if a sometimes-deadly virus lacking a known cure was brought from Africa to, say, Atlanta.

The Muslims who want to destroy us, the gays who want to force their kind of sex upon us, the Ebola virus that kills at an 80 percent rate in Africa--these fears provide invaluable currency for the contemporary American demagogue.

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So, yes, we find ourselves returned to the woefully familiar subject of Jason Rapert.

To remind: He's the raging grandstander who infests the state Senate by the misguided appointment of people around Conway.

In 2010 Rapert stood before a Tea Party rally and brayed that President Barack Obama was friendly to Muslim religious observances--which was true, as George W. Bush also had been--but not Christian observances--which was not true.

This year Rapert pushed through a legislative resolution infringing unconstitutionally on the separation of powers. It called on the state Supreme Court to overturn a circuit court ruling and uphold the state's statutory ban on same-sex marriage.

Then, on Saturday, Rapert was in Georgia to give a guest sermon Sunday in the town of Jesup.

Also entering Georgia that day was Dr. Kent Brantly. He's the young Texas doctor who had been doing humanitarian work for a Franklin Graham charity. He was made ill by the Ebola virus while tending to Liberians suffering from the infection.

Brantly was brought to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for meticulous isolation and steady care in helping his system stay strong enough to do what it could to fight a virus for which there is no current vaccination.

A politician seeking to inform and to urge reason and calm would have taken time to understand that the special Emory facility is designed precisely for such isolation and the acute care not available anywhere else.

A politician seeking to inform and to urge reason and calm would have taken time to understand that the Ebola virus has been widely present all along in meticulously attended isolation in American research laboratories.

A politician seeking to inform and to urge reason and calm might have taken the time to arrive at the humanely logical conclusion that a deathly ill American deserved the finest care available in America to Americans--that the mortality rate of the virus might be lower if the infected could be kept stronger.

A politician seeking to inform and to urge reason and calm might even have suggested that Africa's virus is our virus.

But here's what Rapert did: He went on Twitter to say that, while he prayed for a cure, he thought it "maybe even treasonous" to introduce that virus onto American soil.

When blogger Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times re-posted that tweet and called it Rapert's lowest point ever, Rapert deleted the post and said he was doing so because of heinous liberal misrepresentation.

Unable to determine the misrepresentation--other than conceivably the blog's judgment that Rapert had descended to his personal nadir--I engaged the senator, long a texting pal. I asked what he had meant by the post that the blog quoted and that he then deleted.

He, per usual, responded promptly and graciously.

This is what he texted, absent some chiding about my reading the particular blog in question:

"I believe it would have been safer and more responsible to treat the man on a naval hospital vessel or one of the mercy ships. Not smart to introduce a virus to our nation that has no cure. I have worked in Africa eight times personally and we take every precaution. This virus is dangerous and people in Georgia aren't happy. I'm here to speak tomorrow and I'm hearing from them now."

He heard people's fears. So he rushed to exclaim "maybe even treasonous."

Alas, I must take you back to the beginning, to the description of demagoguery.

Meantime, hospital officials say that Brantly seems to be improving.

I trust that Rapert, a self-professed Christian leader, is praying for him--and all the others sick and dying.

Back in Arkansas, my call over the weekend on social media that state authorities deny re-entry to the state by Rapert, based on his having been in the same state as the infected man, seems to have been ignored.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 08/05/2014

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