Survival of the witless? Unlikely to impossible

Today’s question: When did the survival instinct become politically incorrect in our nation?

The answer: When the nation’s survival did not matter to the politically correct.

Time after time in just the past year, our nation’s well-being has been reduced to an afterthought or an obligatory “we’ve got that covered” when in fact our leaders have been making decisions that put us all at increased risk.

In fact, our current conception of national security looks more like national insanity. A few simple examples should suffice for anyone who does not have their head buried in the sand:

— Ebola: While the United Kingdom quickly instituted an air-travel ban from the three most infected countries in Western Africa to prevent importing this deadly disease, the United States first had no restrictions, then asked people if they were infected or knew anyone who was infected, then stepped up and required that people’s temperature be checked before they got on the plane (at least if they were traveling to one of five major airports). Finally this week, someone (presumably the new Ebola czar) declared that, by gum, everyone from those infected countries would need to report their temperature every day for three weeks, plus all air traffic from those dangerous countries would need to be funneled through the five aforementioned airports.

You might well wonder why the United States doesn’t just do the logical thing to protect its citizens and ban entry to our country by people traveling from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The answer was provided by Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, who explained in a hearing before Congress, “If we tried to eliminate travel, the possibility that someone will travel over land, will come from other places, and we don’t know that they’re coming in will mean that we won’t be able to do multiple things... We won’t be able to check them for fever when they leave. We won’t be able to check them for fever when they arrive. We won’t be able, as we do currently, to take a detailed history to see if they were exposed when they arrive....”

Dr. Frieden’s acrobatic logic appears to mean that if we don’t let the potentially infected African residents into our country legally, they will get here anyway through illegal means, so therefore we should just let them come legally because we are remarkably inept at protecting our borders in the first place.

Political Correctness 1, Survival Instinct 0.

— Of course, Frieden’s candid admission sets the stage for our second example of national insanity: The children’s crusade of illegal immigrants who crossed our borders in an obviously orchestrated invasion several months ago. (Did Homeland Security really think we would not notice that such an massive incursion of unaccompanied minors had not happened previously and has not happened since?) 

A nation that had a survival instinct would have turned those children around at the border and sent them home to their parents or their national authorities. Putting them on planes and flying them to Nicaragua, Honduras or El Salvador would have been a logical solution that would have sent a clear message.

Instead, our brilliant leaders in D.C. decided that our increasingly fragmented and massively overextended country could absorb these thousands of juvenile invaders. They were loaded into buses and planes and shipped from one end of the country to the other where they would await the inevitable amnesty by President Obama, who never met a problem he could not wish away with an executive order.

Within weeks of this surrender plan, hundreds of American youngsters started coming down with cases of the previously rare Enterovirus D68, which mimics polio by paralyzing the arms and legs of children. So far as the CDC is concerned, this is just a massive coincidence, but so far as I am concerned it is a politically correct cover-up.

Just take a look at the news feed on Google. On Friday, these were the headlines: “Two cases of Enterovirus D-68 in North Central Florida,” “Arizona’s first Enterovirus D68 confirmed,” “Enterovirus D68 confirmed in Santa Barbara,” “[N.C.] Baby battling Enterovirus D68 saved by ‘3rd lung,’” “2 Alabama children diagnosed with Enterovirus,” oh yeah, and this one: “Nevada last state in lower 48 without confirmed case of Enterovirus.”

If you won’t even work to protect your children, just how low have you fallen? Or put another way, how much political correctness can a nation stand before it falls?

Political Correctness 2, Survival Instinct 0.

— But perhaps the most obvious failure of the survival instinct in modern America is the inability to recognize the clear and present danger of Islamic fundamentalism (i.e., Muslims who consider the Koran the inerrant word of God).

In the past week, we have read about three teenage girls who flew from Denver to Frankfurt on their way to Syria to join the Islamic State as concubines for the men in black, who need to relax after a busy day at the office crucifying children and cutting the heads off infidels. 

But the three teenage girls were just one example of the enemy within. A variety of so-called Americans have disappeared onto the battlefields in Iraq and Syria to serve with the enemy... yet the United States is incapable even of stripping a passport from someone fighting against his or her very own country.

Nor is this fear of offending Muslims something new. To this day, five years after the Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan slaughtered 13 people, the Obama administration insists that this maniac who was screaming Allahu Akbar (“God is great”) while shooting American soldiers was engaged in “workplace violence” rather than terrorism. Maybe you didn’t hear that Hasan has petitioned to become a citizen of the Islamic State “caliphate,” but I assure you the U.S. Attorney’s Office has.

The Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 and the more recent beheading of a woman in Oklahoma by an Islamic convert should have awakened the American public to the fact that they are the target of Islamic extremism, but it seems the veil of political correctness is dark indeed. The hatchet attack on a New York policeman by an Islamic convert last week is just one more blip on the radar, but if no one is looking at the radar, what difference does it make?

Political Correctness 3, Survival Instinct 0.

America as a whole is no more perspicacious than the mayor of Ottawa, who in response to Wednesday’s murder of a Canadian soldier by an Islamic zealot dressed in black from head to toe, said the attack had “origins as yet not fully known, causes not yet fully understood.” 

Canadian police, the story noted, “would not speculate on a motive for the shooting.” 

Of course, they would not speculate. If they told the truth, that it was another case of an Islamic extremist waging jihad against the West, they would be fired for inciting hate, or some such politically correct nonsense.

Survival of the fittest apparently may preclude not just Americans but all of Western civilization from having a role in the 22nd century. Because, shackled by political correctness as we are, we are definitely not fit to survive.