Last week, President Obama finally began taking Ebola seriously – so seriously that he cancelled a campaign trip in order to hold an emergency meeting on Ebola. He then appointed a new Ebola czar, Ron Klain, whose stellar qualifications for handling a possible Ebola outbreak include flacking for Janet Reno, Al Gore, and Joe Biden. Finally, Obama held another Ebola meeting after going golfing. Klain skipped the meeting. It was the second such meeting Klain skipped.
Don’t worry. The Obama administration has top men on the job. Top. Men.
This makes the 1,297th crisis the Obama administration has initially ignored, then declared a crisis, then ignored again. Which doesn’t mean that the crises disappear – far from it. They accelerate, grow, metastasize. But since prestidigitator Obama has busily misdirected to the next pseudocrisis – Global warming! Sexual assault on college campuses! Fat kiddies shoving fast food down their drooling pieholes! – the media never return to the scene of the continuing crime.
Here are the top crises declared by the Obama administration – and the unreported-upon aftermath:
IRS Scandal. In the aftermath of the IRS admitting that it had targeted conservative non-profit applicants, President Obama said, “Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it.” He then said that there was no need for a special prosecutor – Eric Holder would clearly clean up this mess. Today, conservatives are still being targeted, and the Obama administration continues to obstruct any attempt to find the wrongdoers.
Fast and Furious. “People who have screwed up will be held accountable,” Obama said in October 2011 of an operation approved by his government in which guns were smuggled from the United States to Mexican drug cartels. “It’s very upsetting to me to think that somebody showed such bad judgment that they would allow something like that to happen.” Nobody has been fired. Nobody has been prosecuted. Attorney General Eric Holder, who greenlit the operation, just stepped down as an honored member of the Obama inner circle.
Benghazi. According to then-White House press secretary Jay Carney, the president was “committed to finding out what happened. He is committed to making sure that those who killed four Americans are brought to justice, and he is committed to ensuring that actions are taken after the Accountability Review Board thoroughly assesses this matter, to make sure that what happened in Benghazi never happens again.” Not a single person was fired over the murder of four Americans including an ambassador of the United States in Libya. A year later, according to CBS News, “The State Department still has not fully implemented recommendations.” But hey, it’s been like two years, dude.
The Veterans Administration Scandal. After news broke that the VA had deliberately lied to veterans about their waitlists, leading many vets to die waiting in line, President Obama declared a state of political emergency: “If these allegations prove to be true, it is dishonorable, it is disgraceful, and I will not tolerate it, period.” After initially backing VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, he then threw Shinseki under the bus. And that’s been about it. Nothing material has actually been solved.
ISIS. After stating that ISIS was actually a “jayvee” version of al Qaeda and allowing ISIS to then run roughshod over half of Iraq, President Obama declared ISIS a serious threat to America’s national security and pledged to fight them. “There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force,” Obama explained. Obama has spent the last month bombing our allies, sending humanitarian aid to our enemies, and downplaying ISIS moves toward Baghdad and the Turkish border.
This isn’t simple incompetence. It’s uncaring incompetence. Unless the polls force him to care about a given crisis, Obama’s off golfing. If the polls do force him to care, he can muster up the emotional wherewithal for approximately as much time as it would take him to play nine holes. Then we go back to crisis, worse off than we were before.
But don’t worry. Top men are on the job. Top. Men.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.