In shades of the “mushroom cloud” fear mongering about the Iraq war, Fox News’ Dr. Marc Siegel did his best to scare viewers into thinking some terrible epidemic of malaria, tuberculosis or measles is on its way to our country if we don’t prepare for military action against Venezuela stat!

After super-duper Christian Mike Pence ramped up his bellicosity against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, as did the self-proclaimed president Juan Guaidó, Siegel visited Fox’s America’s Newsroom to offer up a Venezuela version of “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” You may recall that fear mongering was successfully used to sell the unnecessary invasion of Iraq.

This time, however, the “mushroom cloud” is a dreaded disease. And maybe the similarity is no accident given that Siegel is an unabashed fan of Iraq-war salesman Dick Cheney. Siegel told Cheney, in December, 2013, “You have always been known as the steadying hand in a crisis. You’re the person that people want to go to when there’s a crisis.”

After cohost Sandra Smith helpfully referred to Maduro as “Venezuela’s disputed president,” Siegel began his sales job. He started by suggesting he cared about the dire medical situation in Venezuela:

SIEGEL: If you have heart disease in Venezuela today, there’s an 88 percent chance you can’t even get your blood drawn … and a 30 percent chance you can’t get an EKG.

[…]

There’s no basic care there and infectious diseases are rampant, 400,000 cases of malaria, 10,000 cases of TB, and measles, which we’ve been talking about – huge, whopping numbers in Venezuela, seven, eight thousand cases.

That’s a tad ironic coming from Siegel. We vividly remember his complaining about Obamacare that it would provide people with too much medical care and that Americans have too much health insurance.

But it wasn't long before Siegel revealed the real reason he "cared" about the public health of Venezuelans:

SIEGEL: I don’t want to sound heartless, ‘cause this is an issue of compassion and our compassion, as the United States, we’re - really important to us. But you know what? This is also a national security issue. This is a public health issue for something that is going on in our hemisphere. And that’s why I believe, and I’m not alone in this, that we always look at, we don’t want to get involved militarily in other countries’ problems. This is going to spread here. We’re going to have not just migrants spreading here but also health problems spreading here. The United States’ Navy Ship, Comfort, was just down in the area. I’d like to see it return there and I’d like to see it return there with military support.

Closing the segment, cohost Eric Shawn gave his stamp of approval: “It is astounding, it is unacceptable and it is continuing,” he said.

Watch the war-mongering propaganda below, from the February 25, 2019 America’s Newsroom.