October 14, 2014

Ebol-ISIS

My fellow Americans, the past seven days have shown us that elections truly do have consequences. A despicable stew of incompetence, outright lying and a stomach-chruning level of political correctness has colored two crises, both of which could produce disastrous consequences. Today, Americans find themselves afflicted with “Ebol-ISIS.”

My fellow Americans, the past seven days have shown us that elections truly do have consequences. A despicable stew of incompetence, outright lying and a stomach-chruning level of political correctness has colored two crises, both of which could produce disastrous consequences. Today, Americans find themselves afflicted with “Ebol-ISIS.”

Let’s begin with the first half of the equation. On Sunday we learned that a Dallas nurse who had come into contact with Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan had contracted the deadly virus. Enter the increasingly less credible CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, who assured us a “protocol breach” was responsible for the infection. What protocol breach was that? Frieden doesn’t know. The nurse in question wore protective gear that included a gown, gloves, mask, and an eye shield. “It’s deeply concerning that this infection occurred,” Frieden told the media.

How “concerned” was the CDC prior to this revelation? The 48 people being monitored after coming into contact with Duncan did not include anyone who came into contact with him after he was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on September 28. The infected nurse was “self-monitoring” for symptoms. Why no monitoring of the healthcare workers? Because they were wearing protective gear.

If you’re getting a sense there’s a circular illogical at work here, you’re not alone.

By the way, you know who else was “self monitoring?” NBC’s chief medical editor, Dr. Nancy Snyderman – who was spotted in car outside The Peasant Grill in Hopewell, N.J last Thursday, in complete violation of her 21-day “voluntary” quarantine. That quarantine was necessary because Snyderman was part of the NBC crew flown back from Africa after a member of the group, freelance cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, tested positive for the virus.

This episode puts an exclamation point on the insanity that informs two different aspects of the administration’s current policy. First, the Obama administration continues to insist that people from the afflicted nations in West Africa will be allowed to fly into America airports. They continue to assure us that domestic screenings at five airport,s accounting for nearly 95 percent of the approximately 150 people traveling daily from or through those nations is sufficient. The 7 to 8 people who enter the country on a daily basis among the more than five percent that don’t get monitored at all? No one is asking why that isn’t considered utterly irresponsible. Who’s doing the monitoring? Customs and Border Protection agents looking for “visibly sick” patients. Medical expertise? Zero. People who show no signs of the virus – exactly like the late Thomas Eric Duncan? Roll out the red carpet.

Snyderman reveals the second part of the insanity. If a medical expert will violate quarantine, what kind of behavior can we expect from everyone else? The answer to that question is stunningly simple, even as it completely eludes the Obama administration: people will act in their own self-interest, utterly irrespective of common sense, or concern for anyone else. And that includes desperate people coming from West Africa, convinced the only chance they have to survive Ebola is to get to an American medical facility, by any means necessary.

Regardless, Frieden says that health and security officials “think it’s manageable.” Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia, does his best to come up with an alternative screening process involving a polymerase chain reaction that makes “pre-symptomatic infections identifiable.” The testing can be done in about a third of the time it takes for a trans-Atlantic flight, meaning the plane itself “would become the quarantine.” Yet once again this assumes that flights will continue, and Mukherjee gives the game away in that regard in the opening paragraph of his piece. “Even if every system in place to identify suspected carriers had been working perfectly, (Duncan) may have still set off a mini-epidemic in Dallas,” he writes.

We hope it’s a mini-epidemic. We know the CDC and the Obama administration are flying blind.

Unsurprisingly, American leftists smell blood on the water and have taken to blaming the GOP. An ad by the leftist Agenda Project will run in battleground states. It contends austerity cuts to the CDC and NIH are responsible for the outbreak. MSNBC’s Joy Reid tweets that the spread of Ebola occurred at a private hospital in a red state, while NBC’s Chuck Todd insists the media and Republicans are pushing irrational fear to win votes.

Sorry my leftist comrades, but as long as the gates to America remain wide open at airports, and our sieve-like Southwest border – courtesy of an Obama administration and a Democrat party in favor of both—it is the American left that owns this potential catastrophe.

One last thing to note: when Frieden spoke on Sunday he assured us the government would be getting health facilities around the nation up to speed on the proper protocols for containing the spread of the virus. Duncan was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital over two weeks ago. In short, the sclerotic, largely unaccountable bureaucracy, besotted by political correctness – as in the big government the left tirelessly champions – may prove to be as deadly as Ebola itself, if not more so.

In the meantime, ISIS marches on. The Syrian border town of Kobani is under siege and virtually certain to fall, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey revealed the terrorist thugs were only 16 miles from Baghdad airport. Only the arrival of  U.S. Apache helicopters prevented the Iraqi Army from being completely overrun. Dempsey insisted that until the Iraqi government won over the Sunni part of the population, things wouldn’t get any better. “Until those facts change, this is going to be a very challenging task,” he said. “In other words, until ISIL doesn’t have, you know, freedom of movement in and among the populations of Al Anbar Province and Nineveh Province, and in Eastern Syria, this is going to be a challenge.”

You now what might be an even bigger challenge? ISIS overrunning Baghdad and deposing the Iraqi government, while the Obama administration continues to dither, as defined the by incredulous notion that the Free Syrian Army troops who will be ready to fight months from now will somehow turn the tide. Even more appalling, Kurdish troops fighting in Kobani – Kurdish troops that have been our most reliable allies in the fight against this scourge – have been left twisting in the wind. “Our focus in Syria is in degrading the capacity of [ISIS] at its core to project power, to command itself, to sustain itself, to resource itself,” said US Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken, in a pathetic attempt to obscure the sellout. “The tragic reality is that in the course of doing that there are going to be places like Kobani where we may or may not be able to fight effectively.”

Even the usually clueless Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) can see the writing on the wall. “They’re winning and we’re not,” he said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union”. “The Iraqis are not winning, The peshmerga, the Kurds are not winning.”

Moreover a cursory google search reveals what the Obama administration refuses to admit: airstrikes alone will not get the job done. And they won’t admit it because they would then have to admit that removing American troops prematurely from Iraq in 2011 was directly responsible for the rise of ISIS. And despite every indication that “boots on the ground” is the only realistic way of stopping the terror army’s advance, National Security Advisor Susan Rice assured the nation it isn’t going to happen. “We are not going to be in a ground war again in Iraq,” Rice said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s not what is required by the circumstances that we face and even if one were to take that step, which the president has made clear we are not going to do, it wouldn’t be sustainable.”

Neither is a spate of domestic terror attacks, Ms. Rice, courtesy of an organization that grows in confidence with every passing day – and each additional victory.

Thus barring a miracle, the “virus” of Islamic fundamentalism will be treated in much the same way as Ebola. The public will be told whatever this administration perceives is necessary to get them past the mid-term elections, be it truth, dissembling or outright lies. And by far, the most reliable aspect of the Obama administration’s fight against Ebola and ISIS will be its relentless unreliability.

Nonetheless, we are advised not to panic. Yet one suspects panic is not the operative reaction here. A seething anger and monumental frustration with this administration’s self-inflicted incompetence is far more likely. It has been amplified by the dawning realization that giving this president another four years has resulted in perhaps the worst assemblage of government officials in modern American history.

And as Ebola in Dallas and the beheading in Oklahoma indicate, Ebol-ISIS has taken root in America. May God help us all.

© 2014 The Patriot Post

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