A friend of mine was chatting with me online and, appropos of nothing, sent me a link to a caricature of President Obama as Alfred E. Neuman.
As I studied and chuckled at the drawing (it really was quite good, and I fondly recall old Alfred E. from MAD Magazine) my friend laid down the Triple Trope that's all the buzz among conservatives and those on the fringes:
"Ebola, ISIS, and open borders - What, me worry?"
Once again, it was appropriate with the drawing. And it was appropriate that I answer it:
Ebola? Nothing short of stopping all international commerce with everyone would have prevented Ebola from making it here. Our modern interconnectedness is a two-edged sword. We get food and electronic equipment from Asia, along with Formosan termites and tiger mosquitoes, just to name an example at random. A recent Oxford study suggests that HIV's spread coincided with the growth of Western colonialism and railroad construction in the Congo starting about 1920. House and Senate cuts to funding for the NIH and CDC have virtually guaranteed that once Ebola got here, the response will have issues.
Open borders? That's code for 'brown people,' and there have been people kvetching about the influx of people from the south for over a hundred years (you don't hear anyone complaining about Canada, you know). It was a knotty and politically fraught problem for He Must Not Be Named* and it continues to be under Obama. Eventually a solution will be found, but it'll take a lot more intelligence than I'm currently seeing from the House and Senate to do it.
ISIS? President Obama has been characterized as a 'Vulcan' for his cool and cerebral manner, but he'd have to be a damned Time Lord to fix this one. I told my friend so; it would be necessary to go back to 2002 and somehow convince He Who Must Not Be Named* that invading Iraq would lead to no end of trouble down the road. Of course, neither He nor His puppeteers would listen.
My friend, who is sort of conservative/libertarian (he votes Independent, which is code for Republican in Arkansas), did me the honor of acknowledging the justice of my arguments, which is something. Ten years ago, I would have been called a traitor.