Why We Cannot Trust the White House on Ebola

On Thursday morning, I received my first well-produced Facebook message mocking those deluded souls, presumably on the right, who are worried about the spread of Ebola.  The only thing that surprised me about the message was that I had not seen one sooner.

The same people who gave us homophobia and Islamophobia (not to mention racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, nativism, and climate denial) are about to give us Ebolaphobia.  As former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel notoriously said (while plagiarizing Winston Churchill), “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”[amazon asin=B0008F5HIM&template=*lrc ad (right)]

The Obama White House will exploit this crisis, if it becomes one, in ways that alarmists do not anticipate. Obama will not declare martial law or shut down the polls in November – I hope – but he and his cronies will begin immediately to stigmatize the opposition as xenophobes and racists.  They have done this before on other issues, and there is no time better to do it again than a month before national elections.

Obama and his allies will do this because they can get away with it.  The media have enabled Obama’s mean-spirited mendacity from his breakout appearance at the 2004 Democratic Convention to today, and they show no sign of mending their ways.  In the process, they have helped Obama create what Marc Thiessen charitably described in the Washington Post as “a fundamentally [amazon asin=B002UFLQ60&template=*lrc ad (right)]dishonest presidency.”

In my newest book, You Lie!, I set out to chronicle President Obama’s many divergences from the truth.  What I ended up doing was writing a history of the presidency.  He and his enablers have proven themselves capable of lying on every subject of significance, and on none more boldly than those involving race and illegal immigration, like the issue of Ebola.

Obama’s distinctive upbringing had much to do with making him the fabulator he became.  Too many of those who have studied the president have gone awry by trusting Obama’s own accounts of that upbringing in his memoir Dreams from My Father.  In fact, the parent who shaped him was not his father, but his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.[amazon asin=1936239906&template=*lrc ad (right)]

As a mixed-race child in a world with monolithic expectations, Dunham could have infused her son with the most powerful and compelling of all identities – that of an “American.”  She did the opposite.  In one of the more believable passages in Dreams, Obama told one revealing story about his mother’s allegiances.

During their Indonesian years together, Dunham’s then husband, Lolo Soetoro, asked Dunham to meet some of “her own people” at the American oil company where he worked.  She shouted at him, “They are not my people.”  Obama absorbed the attitude.  Even as a boy, he saw his fellow citizens abroad as “caricatures of the ugly American,” and they would not grow prettier over time.

When he returned to Hawaii as a ten-year-old, Obama struggled to define who he was.  Given what he knew about Americans, he could[amazon asin=0804139210&template=*lrc ad (right)] have hardly wanted to be one.  As to being an African-American, all he knew was what he saw on TV.  And so he told his new schoolmates that his father was a prince and his grandfather a chief of a great African tribe.

The story worked on his classmates and almost on himself.  “But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie,” he writes, “something I’d constructed from the scraps of information I’d picked up from my mother.”  For the next forty years, Obama would continue constructing identities for himself: high school stoner, college Marxist, New York intellectual, Chicago Alinskyite, Harvard cosmopolitan, African-American ward heeler, all-American presidential candidate.

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