The New Neo

The Times reports he’s just “seething” with anger:

Beneath the calming reassurance that President Obama has repeatedly offered during the Ebola crisis, there is a deepening frustration, even anger, with how the government has handled key elements of the response.

Those frustrations spilled over when Mr. Obama convened his top aides in the Cabinet room after canceling his schedule on Wednesday. Medical officials were providing information that later turned out to be wrong. Guidance to local health teams was not adequate. It was unclear which Ebola patients belonged in which threat categories.

“It’s not tight,” a visibly angry Mr. Obama said of the response, according to people briefed on the meeting. He told aides they needed to get ahead of events and demanded a more hands-on approach, particularly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The buck continues its failure to stop at the president’s desk. Actually, I don’t think the buck ever even visits the vicinity.

However, the president isn’t to blame for everything in the US ebola mess. He’s not to blame for the incompetence of whoever dealt with Thomas Duncan the first time he went to the Dallas Presbyterian ER. Nor is he to blame for everything wrong with an agency like the CDC; some of that has probably been brewing for ages.

But Dr. Tom Frieden is Obama’s own appointment. He’s responsible for that, and Frieden is a disaster. Obama’s responsible for not firing him. He’s responsible for appointing a hack like Klain to fix things.

Obama is described in the ridiculously Obama-serving Times article as having become alarmed when the second nurse from Dallas was diagnosed with ebola. But Obama’s responsible for not sensing that things were already out of control long before that. He’s responsible for the claptrap his mouthpiece Josh Earnest spouts when asked about travel bans:

“If we are trying to protect the American public, we should not put in a travel ban,” Earnet said. He added, “If you put in place a travel ban from West Africa, those individuals could go to other countries and try to travel here and disguise their original destination.”

Earth to Obama/Earnest: no they can’t, not if we put a visa ban into effect. I think they purposely misunderstand what people are suggesting, creating a strawman that they can knock down more easily, rather than responding to the actual proposal to ban commercial travel here by nationals of the ebola-affected countries. Obama is responsible for refusing to implement the proposal or even to represent it properly when he argues against it.

I wrote that Obama isn’t responsible for the errors committed in the ER of the Dallas hospital. And he’s not. But then again maybe he is, at least a little bit. Obamacare has been demonstrated to have increased patients’ use of ERs rather than decreased it, and so to the degree that the Dallas ER may have made mistakes because it was overburdened or short-staffed (and I don’t know whether either was part of the problem, but it’s highly possible), Obama is at least somewhat at fault for that, too.

Heck of a job, Barack. Heck of a job.

…mean that Dinesh D’Souza was right in The Roots of Obama’s Rage? In the book, he describes how one of Obama’s biggest motivations is his hatred of colonialism in Africa, and a desire to redress and/or revenge its wrongs for his father’s sake:

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir “the record of a personal, interior journey”“a boy’s search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” And again, “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, “My father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!”

The climax of Obama’s narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave. It is riveting: “When my tears were finally spent,” he writes, “I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America”“the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago”“all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that “I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.” In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit. Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright.

And also on the topic of West African travel bans, here’s an article in Politico that purports to tell us travel ban advocates just why what we’re proposing isn’t a good idea.

Only thing is, the geniuses there make several major errors. The first is to completely misunderstand (or purposely misrepresent) what is being advocated, which is not a complete travel ban but merely a ban on West African nationals coming from there to this country on commercial flights—in other words, a denial of visas to that group of people. The second is the sophistic trick of saying that because something doesn’t stop the problem entirely, it’s worthless—ignoring the idea of slowing down or diminishing the problem. A third problem is that, like our condescending public officials in the public health game, they merely assert that “the reality, the experts say, is that those kinds of measures have failed before.”

Well, hey, if the experts say it, that’s good enough for me! No need to tell me where those measures have been tried, what they consisted of, and how failure was measured, and let me see whether I think there’s any analogy to the present situation that makes sense. I won’t bother my pretty little head about the details.