THE PATRIOT POST - ALEXANDER'S COLUMN 10/22/2014

The Demos' 'Good Crisis' Diversion

Obama's Epidemic of Domestic and Foreign Policy Failures

By Mark Alexander · October 22, 2014   

"[T]he crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves." --George Washington (1774)

Ten years ago, a smooth-talking "community organizer" from Chicago won a U.S. Senate seat. Just four months prior to his election, Barack Obama was an obscure state senator and part-time law-school lecturer. That was before his key political benefactor, then-presidential candidate John Kerry, gave him the coveted keynote speaker's slot at the 2004 Demo Convention.
After taking his seat in the Senate in January 2005, the charismatic Obama and his Beltway backers immediately set their sights on the White House. In February 2007, the junior senator from Illinois launched his presidential campaign. In 2008, he cruised to victory over Republican John McCain amid a cascading crisis of confidence in the U.S. banking and securities markets, promising millions of his sycophantic supporters prosperity draped in his "Hope and Change" mantra.
For the record, that crisis of confidence was seeded by statist Democratic Party policies enacted a decade earlier, as noted in a financial analysis by The New York Times: “Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people... In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the [thrift industry] savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.”
Indeed, in 2006, it did, because the "real estate bubble" burst with a domino effect through the financial markets that would lead to a near collapse of those markets in 2008.
Recall that during this meltdown, Obama's then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had infamously and unapologetically asserted, “You don’t ever want a good crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” I repeat Emanuel's quote with some regularity, because rarely does an executive-level Democrat operative inadvertently reveal his party's most successful political playbook pretense.
Obama recently proclaimed, “At some point, we’ve got to do some governing. And certainly, what we can’t do is keep careening from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis.”
In truth, however, Obama and his fellow Democrats thrive on manufactured crises, and the current endless loop of hyperbolic rhetoric about the "Ebola epidemic crisis" from all corners of the 24-hour news recyclers has diverted voter attention from the real national security crisis -- the re-emergent epidemic of terrorism in the Middle East.
How can we tell that Obama is using Ebola as political fodder ahead of the upcoming midterm elections? He started skipping fundraising events across the country last week.
This was an unprecedented interruption of his schedule -- a schedule whose fundraising and golfing excursions, until then, had been free from interruption even during events of great national consequence.
For example, prior to the 2012 election, just hours after the Benghazi attack and the initial talking points cover-up, Obama held a major fundraiser in Las Vegas. Of course, to interrupt his schedule for that crisis would have been politically counterproductive given that a cornerstone of his re-election campaign was his singlehanded defeat of al-Qa'ida and his ending of the war in Iraq.
And last July, on the day that a Malaysian passenger airliner was shot down over the Ukraine by Russian regulars, and Israel launched ground operations in Gaza, Obama nevertheless proceeded with his fundraising and golfing schedule.
Responding to criticism about his priorities, his director of communications, Jennifer Palmieri, who was herself instrumental in the Benghazi deception, rebutted, “It is rarely a good idea to return to the White House just for show, when the situation can be handled responsibly from the road. Abrupt changes to his schedule can have the unintended consequence of unduly alarming the American people or creating a false sense of crisis."
Having put “boots on the ground” -- to fight Ebola in West Africa -- in a thinly veiled attempt to recast himself as the “humanitarian president” while neck deep in the rubble of his foreign policy failures elsewhere around the world, Obama "returned to the White House just for show" last week in order to continue his Ebola charade.
He is now doing what Democrats do best -- never letting a good crisis go to waste.
Asked about why Obama interrupted his schedule to address Ebola just ahead of the midterm elections, his spokesman Josh Earnest replied with a smirk, "To be candid ... I try to consider my words carefully when I speak up here, and the fact is I haven't given any thought to the political consequences of this response."
Yes, because we all know that the last thing key players in the Obama regime would do is "give any thought to political consequences."
CNN's resident Marxist talkinghead, Van Jones, understands why Obama is exploiting Ebola: "We've got to get our base going. ... This Ebola thing is the best argument you can make for the kind of government that we believe in."
Of course, "the kind of government" that would exploit "this Ebola thing" is the kind that demands mindless devotion to its imperialist president in order to advance its oppressive statist agenda.
Advancing the Ebola farce, this week Obama named an "Ebola Czar, loyalist lobbyist Ron Klain, the former chief of staff for both Al Gore and Joe Biden. For the record, we already had a czar for pandemic threats, Dr. Nicole Lurie.
Klain is a doctor of spin, not medicine, but apparently he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express the night before his appointment!
Predictably, Democrats are now running political ads in states where their senatorial candidates are in trouble. The ads blame the Republican sequester for cuts to the budgets of HHS agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health, which "left our nation exposed to Ebola."
However, it is the Obama administration that proposed cuts to the CDC and NIH budgets. The Washington Post notes, "For NIH, since 2006, there has been relatively little change in the size of the budget, going from about $28.5 billion in 2006 to $30.14 billion in 2014. In fiscal year 2013, the White House proposed a cut in CDC’s funding, but Congress added about $700 million. In 2014, the administration again proposed reducing the budget, but Congress boosted it to $6.9 billion."
There seems to be enough surplus funding at HHS to spend on critical health crises such as, "Why are most lesbians overweight?"
The fact is, the CDC and NIH are funding some research on legitimate concerns, such as lowering the number of annual deaths associated with the spread of influenza -- 53,826 in the latest year of record. Yes, there has been one death in the U.S. (of a Liberian national) since Ebola "reached our shores," and there may be more. In the meantime, however, Enterovirus D68 has already spread to 44 states and is killing otherwise healthy elementary-age American schoolchildren.
Of course, what has really left our nation exposed to Ebola is Obama's negligent refusal to institute a travel ban to and from African nations where there is an actual epidemic crisis. Other than the pretense of restriction announced this week, directing those incoming from infected nations to five major U.S. airports, Obama does not dare offend the Demos' black constituents by temporarily restricting African immigration visas.
Obama's failure to implement travel restrictions is being challenged by some Demo senators who are running for their political lives. In North Carolina, for example, Sen. Kay Hagan's position on travel restrictions was, "If you isolate those countries you're not going to solve the problem." This week, however, Hagan claimed, "I've always said that the travel ban should be part of a broader use of tactics."
The bottom line in this and every election is that Democrats are experts at manufacturing crises for political fodder in support of their key agendas, and have repeatedly demonstrated their propensity for doing just that.
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The blood of innocents was barely dry in Tucson, Arizona, and Newtown, Connecticut, before Obama and his Leftist NeoCom cadres seized the moment to advance gun control. Obama's criminal co-conspirator, AG Eric Holder, lamented this week, "The thought that we could not translate that [Newtown] horror into reasonable gun safety measures ... is something that I take personally as a failure, and something that I think we as a society should take as a failure -- a glaring failure."
Of course by "reasonable gun safety measures," Holder means, ultimately, rendering the Second Amendment null and void.
Team Obama is always on the alert for race-bait crises too -- all the better to promote the politics of disparity. The Zimmerman/Martin shooting in Florida and the Wilson/Brown shooting in Missouri are case studies from the Demo playbook.
And when was the last time a hurricane, tornado, flood or drought did not become fodder for the Left's so-called "climate change" agenda? Never, ever, ever let a good crisis go to waste.
As for the Ebola crisis, even late-night humorist Conan O'Brien gets the charade: "Obama told Americans not to panic about Ebola. Then when asked about the Democrats' chances in the upcoming midterm election, Obama said, 'Man, that Ebola sure is scary!'"
Of course, the real crisis we face as a nation is a fundamental lack of leaders who honor their oaths "to Support and Defend" our Constitution. If Republicans can't take the Senate in November and raise up new leaders for both the House and Senate who will honor their oaths, that crisis will most assuredly continue -- and deepen.