Fox's Charles Krauthammer took a page right out of former Rep. Duncan Hunter and some right-wing members of the Senate's playbook while discussing the fiasco with the nurse, Kaci Kickox, who had been forcibly quarantined in a tent by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Krauthammer used the occasion to yuck it up and make light of the conditions the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are being held under. No mention of course of the waterboarding, hunger strikes and force feedings, or that the people there are being held indefinitely without ever being allowed to see the inside of a courtroom.
From this Monday's Special Report with Bret Baier:
BAIER: There is also an anxiety about what the Pentagon policy will be. We have not heard from the Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel about what exactly the policy will be. The White House couldn't answer, or wouldn't answer today whether Hagel is going to make this any time soon.
KRAUTHAMMER: It's a competence issue again. They obviously have no idea. They obviously enunciated a contradiction by having eleven soldiers who were already over there now in quarantine and taking the side of nurse Hitchcock... Hickox, who was in involuntary quarantine in New Jersey. It makes no sense.
They're going to have to work out a policy and I think the prudent policy is, if you're a soldier, it's not as if you're losing your days on the job, your job is to be a soldier, and if the Army decides you should be three weeks in quarantine, it doesn't have to be in a tent.
You can have a place, you know, at least I'd give them Guantanamo conditions, you know, good meals, a soccer field, high definition television, access to all kinds of stuff you wanted.
If you're going to put someone in quarantine whose not guilty of a crime, or suspected only of an illness, then you treat them as well as you can. You know, the nurse was not that well treated and I respect that, but as a matter of principle are they allowed to go? I think the idea of self-quarantine is a contradiction in terms.
BAIER: Sort of like self-deportation?
KRAUTHAMMER: Well, that could work, but self-quarantine doesn't work. If you're in self-quarantine and you walk out into a subway, the authorities are going to grab you and put you back in your house or in a tent, so it doesn't really work. It's the state asserting its authority over you and in this potential epidemic you have to do it.
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