Unbelievable

It’s unbelievable, it’s strange but true
It’s inconceivable it could happen to you
You go north and you go south
Just like bait in the fish’s mouth
You must be livin’ in the shadow of some kind of evil star
It’s unbelievable it would get this far  ~ Bob Dylan



Okay, I know that only one person in the United States has died from Ebola. But a month ago that number was zero.


President Obama, yesterday, warned against "hysteria". As if you are wrong to be just a little bit worried about a disease that kills almost 70% of the people it infects. This from the same administration that is having a literal cow about what high schoolers eat. Joe Scarborough tweeted out: "It would be eas­ier to trust ap­peals for calm if of­fi­cials didn't act as if it is ab­surd to fear a pathogen that liq­ue­fies or­gans."

True, more people have died from obesity than Ebola in the United States. But they don't wash an airplane down with Clorox multiple times when a passenger brings on a donut.

Peggy Noonan, as usual, describes it perfectly. "Again, the public isn’t hysterical but concerned. One reason is that they have witnessed a series of bad decisions by the government and its institutions. Another is that they know there’s no one to trust in this crisis, no official person who is in charge and seems equal to the task."

Does anyone seriously trust President Obama in this situation?  Honestly. What in his background, his demeanor or previous performance  would lead one to believe he has any clue on how to handle this?

I know where this will go. Any time you criticize President Obama you hear a myriad of responses, the nicest being the accusation of rank partisanship. Am I saying Bush or McCain or Romney would have done better? No, I have no idea how they would have responded. I do have a feeling that they wouldn't have appointed Ron Klain as the "Ebola Czar".  Klain's main qualifications for the job appears to be that Obama knows him and Kevin Spacey played him in a movie.

Klain may be a brilliant move. He might whip everyone into shape and calm everyone's nerves. Maybe. I'm just saying that there was nobody in this country who said, "Whew! Thank God Ron Klain is in charge!"

Again, there are pros and cons to every issue, but really, what is the objection of a travel ban from the effected West African countries? The President said, "Trying to seal off an entire region of the world—if that were even possible—could actually make the situation worse.” He doesn't say how banning travel from a country that is spreading a pathogen that liquefies organs is "sealing it off" or how it would make the situation worse.

I will translate what the President said. He is actually  saying "You are being stupid. Shut up and let us smart people handle this. Geez. I gave up a fund raising trip for this?"

Some critics of the travel ban say it wouldn't work 100% so why do it any way.  Well, we know what doesn't work. What doesn't work is what we have now. Noonan says, "The burden is on those who oppose a ban to make a hard, factual, coherent and concrete case. It is telling that so far they have not been able to."

Part of the problem with the Obama Presidency is that the Big Media-The New York Times, Washington Post, etc-has always treated it as it was special, and that's never good for an administration or a country. Even today, they still treat him like a rock star. The Times sometimes acts likes stenographers for The White House instead of  the Fourth Estate.

However, Frank Bruni of The New York Times, who is never on a Fox News panel says this: "Ebola is his presidency in a petri dish. It’s an example already of his tendency to talk too loosely at the outset of things, so that his words come back to haunt him. There was the doctor you could keep under his health plan until, well, you couldn’t. There was the red line for Syria that he didn’t have to draw and later erased."

Bruni continues, "Still, he has to make Americans feel that he understands their alarm, no matter how irrational he deems it, and that they’re being leveled with, not talked down to, not handled. And he has a ways to go."

It is unbelievable that after six years, he still has a ways to go.