It is tough not to notice the Ebola scare circulating around the country. CNN seems to have another doctor on air every day discussing what to think of the problem. I am not going to write about how you should panic over Ebola. It is safe to say that our health care system will keep the Ebola numbers from growing.
What is extremely disturbing is U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration’s response to the crisis. How is it that the President of the United States can be caught that off guard by the disease arriving in the United States? The outbreak of Ebola started in the middle of the summer. It may not have made its way to America until Sept. 30, but it shocks me to find out that the Obama administration never thought it would. The fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is only now developing guidelines on how to handle Ebola in hospitals is shameful. This should have started when the outbreak began. Yet while this is very disconcerting, it is not surprising. The Obama administration has been behind the ball on many issues since he first took office, with the Ebola outbreak only being the latest.
Happening around the same time as the Ebola outbreak this summer, was the crisis in Iraq. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant quickly moved through Iraq and destroyed the parts the Iraqi army did not flee. The Obama administration seemed to get their information through the news networks just as we did. Now, whether or not you agree with the administration’s position to remove troops from Iraq, they still should have been able to receive intelligence about the upcoming ISIL threat. The United States was caught completely off guard, and our response was therefore delayed, which allowed ISIL to gain a serious foothold within Iraq. When the administration finally began conducting air strikes, they were not as effective as what they could have been, ultimately drawing this conflict out longer than it has to be.
Even earlier than that, the administration was completely blindsided by the scandal at the Veterans Administration in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, when long wait lines led to the death of multiple veterans, followed by a cover up. All of this was completely unknown to the Obama administration. Perhaps you wish to give the Obama administration a pass for events that happened outside of our borders, but you cannot allow him to skate free from the problems of his administration. The secretary of the VA and all of its employees report directly to the President, and therefore, the President having no knowledge of what was going on was completely unacceptable.
The past two years have been plagued with scandal for President Obama. There was the National Security Agency scandal, the Associated Press scandal, the Internal Revenue Service scandal and the Benghazi scandal, which would not go away. Again, the Obama administration claimed it found out about these issues from the press, which has to be a lie considering they were spying on the press in the AP scandal. The fact that the Obama administration had no idea what the Obama administration was doing is horrifying at best.
But if there is any scandal that represents the pure incompetence of the Obama administration, it is the handling of the Affordable Care Act. To begin with, the President promised that if you liked your health care plan, you could keep it, and this turned out to be an absolute lie. Then, when the website rolled out, it could not handle the influx of customers signing up. How is it possible that the Obama administration did not expect a large amount of people to flock to the website, when it was forcing people to buy insurance from the website with the threat of a tax?
Even as the law was moving through Congress, the administration pushed the law through the legislative process, skipping key legislative hurdles when they thought the law would be blocked. This is what is causing such trouble for the law now, as there was no chance for Congress to review it before it was sent to the President.
Perhaps you will think some of these scandals are not the administration’s fault, but the fact that there are so many of them is extremely disheartening. These scandals happened within the administration, or within countries that the Obama administration was heavily involved in. Regardless, the sheer number of humiliations within the six years of his administration shows just how incompetent the Obama administration is.
