EBOLA ROUND-UP 10/3/14

Listening to events over the past week, especially with regard to the incident in Dallas leaves one wondering.  The news keeps changing regarding the potential threat.

President Obama said not to worry. . .it wouldn't happen here, but it has happened.  And the CDC was saying how difficult it was to spread and even Chris Matthews the liberal talk host at MSNBC went after his inconsistencies.  So where are we?

"Obama Nixed Bush-Era Quarantine Proposal":  In 2010, the Obama administration withdrew updated quarantine regulations drafted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and proposed by the Bush administration. The new rules would have required air passengers to submit more information to airlines and strengthened the government’s authority to detain travelers suspected of carrying disease.

Liberals like to say that President Bush and Republicans generally are “science deniers.” But in this instance, Bush followed the path recommended by the Centers for Disease Control — no science deniers, they. It was Obama who elevated ideology over science thereby (to borrow the CDC’s words) denying Americans “critical” protection against “dangerous diseases spread by travelers.

"Obama Rips Bush for Being Unprepared for Avian Flu Outbreak":  But something must have been done right, according to the article. . .you don't hear about the Avian flu anymore.

Investors.com.  "Obama's Pathetic Response to Ebola Isn't Reassuring."  "The chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low," President Obama said recently. But he was wrong. We wonder: Was he repeating a considered medical opinion, or just offering his own?

The Hill.  "Health Officials Clam Up about the Effort to Contain Ebola in Texas."  It sounds like the CDC and others don't know what they are doing.

George Will:  "Americans Want to Trust Government But Can't."

Vice President Joe Biden:  "The disease spreads with blinding speed"--but there are no travel restrictions.  The Veep should maybe read the Daily Mail.  With open borders and travel who knows who or what is coming in.

Cleaning up Dallas apartments without proper suits!  Government gone brain-dead.

Chris Matthews goes after Obama ("it isn't likely") and Ezekiel Emmanuel.

NBC News:  "Ibuprofen Is All It Takes to Pass Airport Screening."

TERROR ATTACK IN KENYA

This report from the Daily Mail is the best coverage I have seen.

The terror attack on a Kenyan shopping centre that has left 68 dead was being led by the white English widow of a 7/7 bomber, it was claimed last night.

Soldiers said a white woman wearing a veil was shouting orders to gunmen in Arabic during the bloody massacre inside the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.

BUSH, OBAMA & AFRICA

Powerline:  They miss Bush in Africa.  Bush spent more fighting HIV/AIDS than Obama has.  I am not sure the media will bring this out.

ISLAMISTS DESTROY MALI TOMBS

From Reuters.  Islamists are destroying their own historical heritage.

Residents said the attacks on traditional Sufi Islamic shrines were being carried out by about 15 heavily-armed fighters, some weilding pick axes. At least two previously untouched tombs in Timbuktu, a UNESCO world heritage site, were destroyed on Sunday, residents said.

SUSAN RICE NOMINATION

There have been criticisms of her in the past.

A CNN article from 2008 discusses her involvement in the decision not to capture Bin Laden in the 1990s or help with the Rwandan genocide.

Terrorism experts blame Rice for having played a key role in blocking efforts to neutralize Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. According to Mansoor Ijaz, a former trouble shooter for Clinton, the FBI had their efforts to capture bin Laden "overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan." In a Washington Post Op-Ed published in 2002, Mansoor Ijaz and Tim Carney, U.S. Ambassador to Sudan blamed Susan Rice for being a major obstacle to accepting offers of help from Sudan and to share their intelligence on bin Laden's terror network. Rice was also influential in the Clinton Administration's remaining uninvolved in the Rwandan genocide that took place in that nation in 1994.

And a 2001 article in the Atlantic by Samantha Powers is also critical of her decisions with regard to Rwanda. Evidently Rice has remorse for her involvement in failing to stop the genocide.  But the horrors were committed and in rereading the account, it is tragic that the Clinton administration was not held more accountable for its failure to act.  But today, I fear no one remembers the consequences of these decisions.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.

Others, including a few members of the Africa subcommittees and the Congressional Black Caucus, eventually appealed tamely for the United States to play a role in ending the violence—but again, they did not dare urge U.S. involvement on the ground, and they did not kick up a public fuss.

November 29, 2012:  Further questions about her candidacy by Anne Bayefsky and Michael B. Mukasey in the Wall Street Journal.  There are many other questions about decisions she made in her various positions.  

From Foreign Policy (Nov. 29, 2012).   The ghosts of Rwanda's genocide are in her past.

INVADING MALI?

Radical Islamists have taken over northern Mali and now there is talk of US and European intervention.  

The harshest form of Islamic law in the world is now being imposed at gunpoint. Ancient tombs and shrines are being bulldozed for the exact same reason the Buddha statues were destroyed in Afghanistan. And the place has turned into a rat’s nest of the who’s-who of terrorist organizations operating in North Africa. 

This time around, we aren’t waiting for a devastating attack against an American city to do something about it, and not only because Al Qaeda is already a clearly identified enemy of the United States. Northern Mali may already be the return address for an attack against the United States. Some of the leaders of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, which was presumably behind the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, are believed to be based there.

There are war plans that seem to involve the US.

OBAMA & GAYS IN AFRICA

The administration is promoting gay rights in Africa.

OBAMA AND AFRICA

The news accounts of Obama in Africa indicated he spoke directly and bluntly to the issues facing Africa and said that Africans needed to get their act together when it comes to governing their countries. The media highlighted this trip back to his "roots." (He has also spoken sharply to American African-American groups about their responsibilities). America and the West is not responsible for Zimbabwe and other failures according to Obama.

But the Economist noted that President Bush said essentially the same thing. And ex-President Bush has done as much for African problems as President Obama appears to be doing.

Development depends on good governance.” Said by a white Texan dynast in Ghana, an African country once ravaged by the slave trade, that unexceptionable insight might sound a shade patronising. Said by a son of Africa whose election to the world’s most powerful post thrilled the continent, it was taken at its respectable face value. “We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans.” In other words, throwing aid at bad governments—and Barack Obama made plain that there were still far too many of them—will not work. The president’s candour was well received.

The article also pointed out that Obama's administration has continued the same Bush policies his campaign criticized in the 2008 election campaign.

In fact, though Mr Obama did not wish to dwell on security, his biggest headaches in Africa, as for Mr Bush, do still relate to armed conflict. His worst problem is Somalia, where his closest advisers upbraided Mr Bush for worsening matters by arming Somali warlords who claimed to be fighting militant Islam. More recently, however, Mr Obama won a waiver from the UN to send arms to Somalia’s beleaguered government, which is threatened by jihadists (“terrorists”, he bluntly called them) with links to al-Qaeda. He is unlikely to let his warships or aircraft bomb jihadist strongholds in Somalia for fear of enraging the civilian population. But equally he is plainly loth to let that failed state slide further into the domain of al-Qaeda.

The deeper truth is that Africa is not high on the American president’s agenda. His Ghana speech was sensible and stirring. But in the end his message was that African-American relations would see no grand change.