by Thomas Sowell
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is both a danger in itself and a wake-up call for Americans – about President Obama, about the institutions of this country and, most important, about ourselves.
There was a time when an outbreak of a deadly disease overseas would bring virtually unanimous agreement that our top priority should be to keep it overseas. Yet Barack Obama has refused to bar entry to the United States by people from countries where the Ebola epidemic rages, as Britain has done.
The reason? Refusing to let people with Ebola enter the United States would conflict with the goal of fighting the disease. In other words, the safety of the American people takes second place to the goal of helping people overseas.
As if to emphasize his priorities, President Obama has ordered thousands of American troops to go into Ebola-stricken Liberia, disregarding the dangers to those troops and to other Americans when the troops return.
What does this say about Obama?
At a minimum, it suggests that he takes his conception of himself as a citizen of the world more seriously than he takes his role as president of the United States. At worst, he may consider Americans’ interests expendable in the grand scheme of things internationally. If so, this would explain a lot of his foreign policy disasters around the world, which seem inexplicable otherwise.
Those critics who have been citing Barack Obama’s foreign policy fiascoes and disasters as evidence that he is incompetent may be overlooking the possibility that he has different priorities than the protection of the American people and America’s interests as a nation.
This is a monstrous possibility. But no one familiar with the history of the 20th century should consider monstrous possibilities as things to dismiss automatically. Nor should anyone who has followed Barack Obama’s behavior over his lifetime, and the values that behavior reveals.
A few critics who, early on, sensed something un-American, if not anti-American, in Barack Obama succumbed to the idea that he was not a native-born citizen. That claim blew up in their faces.
Nor was birthplace crucial anyway. People born overseas have put their lives on the line to defend America, and scientists who escaped from Europe in the 1930s played a major role in creating the nuclear bomb that made the United States a superpower. Conversely, the country’s most notorious traitor – Benedict Arnold – was born on American soil.
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SOURCE: World Net Daily
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