OPINION:
If you’re a regular consumer of news, you may be feeling what I’m feeling right now.
We’re living in an age of insanity. Let’s start with Ebola.
The virus is tragically consuming thousands of people in West Africa, and yet America is still accepting flights from the affected countries. After the first patient death in Texas, the Obama administration says it has gotten around to tightening procedures for monitoring passengers into five airports, including Washington Dulles International Airport.
The Washington Post editorialized Thursday against stopping the flights, even while admitting that passenger checks “are not foolproof,” and “Ebola can incubate in a human for up to 21 days, and the infected person does not immediately show symptoms an infected person can go through multiple screenings without setting off alarms.”
On CNN, Centers for Disease Control Director Thomas Freiden avoided answering whether a sneeze may put another person at risk. When pressed, he said, “If you’re within three feet, that’s a situation we’d want to be concerned about.” Been in an airliner lately?
Well, let’s trust that our ultra-effective Obamacare health bureaucracy can limit the damage when the victims fly all over the country. After all, the administration is doing such a great job of containment along the Mexican border.
Does anyone still think our government is acting sanely and doing what’s best for us Americans?
You do? I hope you’re right, but let’s do a sanity reality check.
Would a sane government trade five Taliban terrorist leaders for an American soldier who went AWOL in Afghanistan?
Would a director of national intelligence (James R. Clapper) testify to Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood, whose surrogates have turned the Arab Spring into a bloody regional war, is a “largely secular” organization in Egypt?
Would the administration continue to define as “workplace violence” the slaughter of more than a dozen soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 by a militant Muslim yelling “Allahu akbar”?
How about the Army’s top general (George Casey) observing, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”
Really? How about a disgruntled recent convert to Islam entering his former workplace and beheading a woman — in Oklahoma?
For more insanity in high places, let’s move on to the legal blitzkrieg against marriage laws, with the exception of a single sane judge in Louisiana.
With lightning speed, the federal judicial Borg has ordered a majority of states to ignore the clearly stated wishes of their citizens. As the Supreme Court yawns, black-robed tyrants below are ordering everyone to pretend that brideless or groomless weddings are really “marriages” — or else. Anyone not buying this fiction is a “hater.”
Insanity is rearing its bizarre head in every corner of America. An Obama-Biden sticker on your car is a tip-off, unless you’re in the Free Stuff Army or run an abortion clinic, in which case it makes perfect sense.
We just don’t have enough people who are stoned, so states are rushing to legalize marijuana.
How about sports, the last redoubt of sanity? Well, mostly. The word “fan” is short for “fanatic.”
Did you catch the “God Bless America” performance during the baseball playoff game between the Giants and Nationals in San Francisco? It was sung by a woman (pretty sure) from the cast of “Beach Blanket Babylon,” who wore a huge dress and massive headpiece right out of a drag queen revue. Which is the whole point. Take something as American as apple pie and mock it, right in front of the children, like the inclusion of lewd dancing in last year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Some Frisco sports fans were ecstatic. A blog entry: “Loved the Giants rocking the Beach Blanket Babylon look for God Bless America. This ain’t Kansas anymore, Toto.” Another was delighted that Nationals slugger Bryce Harper “had the most sickened look on his face” during the performance. Perhaps Mr. Harper should have been fined for taking it out on Giant pitchers.
Another entry: “Too bad we couldn’t save her for the Cards series. (Middle America would love her!)”
Yes, shocking “Middle America” is what the insane, leftist, perpetually adolescent culture is all about. When its proponents get into seats of power, they even walk around like crazed children with giant gavels.
In 1971, the British rock group The Kinks released an amazingly reactionary song, “Twentieth Century Man.” It laments big government and the loss of civility, sanity and true art, and it works just as well in 2014:
“It’s the age of insanity
What has become of the green pleasant fields of Jerusalem?
I was born in a welfare state
Ruled by bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants
And people dressed in gray
Got no privacy, got no liberty
Cos the twentieth-century people
Took it all away from me.”
At some point, we need to acknowledge that people who appear to be clinically insane are running the culture and the government, and that we need to do something about it — starting in November.
In the meantime, prayers for our country could do wonders.
Robert Knight is a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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