This administration’s cavalier responses to a series of threats to the safety and security of America and Americans has no parallel in recent history. Although there have been various moments of national peril during the last half-century, never has the nation’s leadership displayed such disinterest, nonchalance, and even recklessness regarding their primary duty to its citizens.
The Ebola scare is but the latest demonstration of official somnolence. While it’s wise for government officials to project calmness so as not to fan hysteria, the administration’s bewildering record of nonfeasance regarding security matters suggests not calmness, but an indifference that seems to invite catastrophe.
At the very time that the terrorist threat has never been greater — when a rabid, well-financed terrorist army proclaims its intent to strike on U.S. soil — this administration opens our borders to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and refuses to tell us where they’re being resettled — by our own government, no less. It sends 3,000 troops to Africa to fight Ebola but rejects sending even three National Guardsmen to secure our southern border, and dismisses any suggestion of travel restrictions from Ebola-stricken West Africa.
The public’s anxiety levels weren’t quite reduced by the news that the commander-in-chief misses 60 percent of his intelligence briefings. Nor were they lowered upon learning that the administration rejected numerous pleas for additional security prior to the 9/11 attack on our consulate in Benghazi. But it’s unclear whether regular intelligence briefings would make any difference. This is a president so comfortable with risk that he would ignore the counsel of his top defense and intelligence advisers to retain a military presence in Iraq, gambling that the global goodwill engendered by his mere presence in the Oval Office was sufficient to forestall the implosion of the Middle East.
And a nuclear Iran? No worries. They can be contained. It’s those Jewish settlements we need to keep an eye on.
Even videotaped beheadings of Americans created no sense of urgency within the administration. Until, that is, polls emphatically showed the American people expected urgency from their government.
And therein lies the limit to Obama’s tolerance for risk. A nation imperiled is one thing; a president or party imperiled is quite another.