The CDC's Global Community Organizer

Most Americans think of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as an efficient, effective, professionally staffed and operated government division, charged with our protection from infectious biohazards. Lionized in fiction, including movies like 2011's "Contagion" and 1995's "Outbreak," most Americans would never imagine that the real-life organization's activities might be affected by political bias. At least, that's the way it used to be.

Ebola has claimed its first casualty in America and, given the current administration's irresponsibility and unaccountability on border issues, the disease will likely spread, at least to a limited degree. The first line of defense in this situation should be the isolation of the source areas, in this case parts of West Africa. And yet, the Obama administration and its politically appointed CDC chief have refused to invoke a commercial flight ban.

CDC Director Thomas Frieden, MD

The face of the CDC to the American public since 2009, Director Thomas Frieden, has spent the past two weeks giving either nonsensical excuses or outright non-sequiturs when pressed on this point. Among several other puzzling apparent lapses in administrative judgment, this is very puzzling. Frieden pointedly ignored challenges that a commercial travel ban would not prevent special charter flights for humanitarian and crisis management purposes.

In Saturday's Wall Street Journal op-ed section, Peggy Noonan tried to explain Frieden's reluctance to invoke a travel ban. According to Noonan, Frieden (like Obama) hates Americans. They hate the idea of America as self-interested and privileged. Just as Obamacare's goal is to eliminate perceived privilege in the capitalist institution of free market health care, Obama, Frieden, and Co., would like to eliminate any such privilege when it comes to global epidemiology. And, just as Obamacare's government decreed standardization of health care has affected most Americans negatively - with rising health care costs and reduced access to health care professionals - the new "we're all nations in this together" CDC approach to Ebola will compromise public health best practices for "community organizer" values taken to possibly lethal extremes. While Noonan's argument has legs, she doesn't go quite far enough in explaining how the general power-grabbing aspect of the administration's approach to crisis management. 

This past spring and summer, an Obama created humanitarian crisis erupted along America's southern border with Mexico. The administration's refusal to secure that border, coupled with its encouragement that young border jumpers would not be deported, resulted in a huge influx of illegal aliens, both young and old, crossing the border. Some parents in Latin America packed their children onto buses and made deals with human-smuggling coyotes to get their children into the U.S.A. illegally. In his final two years in office, it is widely believed that Obama will utilize executive orders to grant a de-facto amnesty to millions of south-of-the-border illegals, effectively granting them instant citizenship - and government dependency - which will quickly bring the far-left wing of the Democratic Party many committed voters. It is a community organizer's dream-come-true and could neutralize any significant conservative challenge to progressive political hegemony for the foreseeable future.

Fast forward back to government policy towards the Ebola outbreak. Invoking a travel ban would reveal the administration's lie about its lack of seriousness in securing the southern border. Exercising the responsibility to secure a border from pathogens might raise questions over why an effective fence (which Obama falsely claimed has been constructed) doesn't exist. This could complicate Obama's expected amnesty push.

CDC Director Thomas Frieden is a political appointee of Barack Obama. And while Frieden's resume includes solid experience with infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis, his career, both as the CDC's Director and as New York City's Department of Health Commissioner under the Bloomberg administration, has been linked to accusations of letting political and ideological factors influence health policy. Frieden played a major role in the attempt (, later ruled unconstitutional,) to limit to 32 ounces the size of a sugared, carbonated soft drink for purchase in New York City. As both New York's Health Commissioner and as CDC chief, he insinuated his medical role into the very non-medical, very ideological, and completely political arena of gun control, equating gun violence and even gun ownership as "diseases."

In a 2012 Oberlin commencement address, Frieden's "pearl" was that optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was a useful-idiot companion mantra to the Hope and Change slogan used to persuade a majority of witless young voters, most of whom lacked either an appreciation or basic knowledge of political history, to vote for Obama. Later in his speech, he described himself as a "community organizer" for a health clinic. The same point brought home, that in the leftist power center, political concerns will trump public service - whatever the ostensible purpose of a public office might otherwise entail - and, if need be, the laws of physics.

A leftist progressive true believer, Thomas Frieden serves the party and its leadership. He believes that central government control is necessary to protect the typical American citizen from himself. Meanwhile, CDC-issued Ebola protocols seem to change daily, and airports and hospitals are not prepared to deal with the threat. May God save America from bureaucrats like this, even if Americans are stupid enough to elect men who will appoint them to positions of responsibility. A propagandist should not be running the CDC and Frieden's resignation is overdue.