On Anderson Cooper 360 last week CNN’s Ebola expert David Quammen — Yale grad, Rhodes scholar — struck the perfect multicultural note. With the fury of a Puritan divine, he scolded those who want to ban commercial travel to West Africa. “How dare we turn our backs on Liberia,” said Quammen, “given the fact that this is a country that was founded in the 1820s, 1830s because of American slavery. We have a responsibility to stay connected to them and help them see this through.”
Quammen was merely saying out loud what the multiculturalists in the Obama administration, the president included, have been thinking: America has become rich by oppressing the people of color. We owe them, even at the cost of American dollars and [amazon asin=0974925381&template=*lrc ad (left)]American lives. In the empty-headed patois of the movement, we must “check our privilege.”
It is this, the logic of multiculturalism, that has dictated the White House response to the Ebola crisis. That logic, however, doesn’t fly with ordinary citizens. So the administration is forced to argue its case in any which way it can. Enter, stage left, the hapless Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention.[amazon asin=0990463109&template=*lrc ad (right)]
“On the issue of banning travel,” said Frieden at an October 13 press conference, “I understand that there are calls to do this. I really try to focus on the bottom line here. The bottom line here is reducing risk to Americans. The way we’re going to reduce risk to Americans is do the steps of protection I just went through and stop it at the source in Africa.”
[amazon asin=B005S28ZES&template=*lrc ad (left)]This bit of gibberish seemed to make at least some sense in every major newsroom in America save one. At Fox News, Bill O’Reilly called Frieden’s comments “stupid and irresponsible,” and in an interview Megyn Kelly challenged him aggressively. To Kelly’s question about the ban, Frieden responded in his cloying, Mr. Rogers-like way, “Above all do no harm.” He then repeated his mantra about stopping the disease at its source as piously as if he were talking to the faithful at MSNBC.
His platitudes weren’t working with Kelly. She pressed him about limiting travel to charter flights, and he could only respond, “Charter flights don’t do the same things commercial airlines do.” Said Kelly on point, “What do you mean? They fly in. They fly out.”
To understand how Frieden could come to play this role, it is useful to know something about his background. As he told the graduates of his alma mater, the uber progressive Oberlin College, in a 2012 commencement speech, his first job out of college was as “a community organizer for a health clinic.” Of note, he claims to have bicycled to that job in Tennessee from Oberlin in Ohio.
