Whatever else may occur, from fizzle to pandemic, the Ebola and Enterovirus D68 outbreaks have gone a long way toward destroying the myth of Obama as omnipotent mastermind.

This has been a long-term conservative preoccupation, something of the flipside of the left’s “Obama as messiah” myth, in which Obama was viewed as something of a Bond villain, striding about in a Mao jacket, aboard his private atomic sub beneath the Potomac, pet marmot on his shoulder, barking orders to hundreds of henchmen (the Emanuel family?) while plotting elaborate and universal atrocities. As posited here, Obama had a Master Plan on the same order as Goldfinger or Blofeld: to transform the U.S. into a third-world state and kick off a race war while playing lots of golf. 

There has never been much to it. Obama has not exhibited a talent for planning on any scale whatsoever. His “plan” was simply to carry on what the American left had been doing since FDR: encourage creeping socialization by taking advantage of the moral weakness of the American populace. The mastermind myth was popular for the same reason that kids tell scary stories around bonfires. The problem was that many took it seriously enough to use as an excuse for inaction.

A major element of this thesis, one common to all conspiracy theories, was the belief that everything that happened, no matter how trivial, or, more to the point, apparently damaging to Obama’s prospects, was actually part of the plan. Obama, you see, had foreseen everything. Not a leaf could fall nor a dog bark without the Lenin of Hyde Park predicting it and fitting it in. There were no disasters -- he wanted them happen, he planned for them, they were a critical part of his overall scheme.

Then came the plagues. The thing about diseases is that they are absolute wild cards. They cannot be predicted or controlled. They follow their own agenda. Emergent diseases possess immense power: they have destroyed cultures, left great cities to the crows and rats, and stopped entire armies in their tracks. Nor has anyone ever figured out how to exploit them -- the major reason why biowarfare has never been used on any scale. Bugs do what they damn well please, and you’d better stay out of their way while they’re doing it.

Barack Obama doesn’t know any of this. As a result of asinine policy borne of  multiculturalism and his obsession with third-world immigration, the doors were left open and deadly disease -- always overlooked by sophisticated urbanites, familiar with only the mild “childhood” diseases -- came roaring in: the result has been the importation of potential epidemic disease into the U.S.: Ebola, enteroviruses, and others. (Dengue fever, which had previously been eradicated from Texas, has returned over the past twenty years, in no small part thanks to slack immigration policy.)

There’s no way to fit this into the mastermind thesis -- unless you accept that O was desperate to destroy his own reputation and alienate himself from most of the voters. The public is furious and frightened. Few have missed the connection between the plagues and Obama’s obsessions and idiosyncrasies, not to mention his unwillingness to make a move in times of crisis until absolutely forced to do so. It is impossible to overlook his complete fecklessness, his failure to do anything at all to confront the crisis. FDR would have been on the radio to reassure the country within hours. Truman or Eisenhower would have begun applying the power of the federal government immediately -- and not in Africa either. But Obama? He sent 3000 troops to West Africa on a fool’s errand and appointed political hack Ron Klain as “Ebola czar.” 

While the left tried to utilize the disease as a cheap weapon against the GOP, this backfired when it turned out that the major figure involved in defunding the CDC was none other than Obama himself. Since then, the lefties have tried their best o low-key events, sneering at “alarmism” and insisting (in the face of over 4,000 deaths in West Africa) that there’s nothing to worry about -- even the disease spreads and nurses beg for presidential help.

The nurses can let it rest, because Obama is working to rule here. This is an old union trick pulled when an actual strike is impossible for legal or strategic reasons. Instead, you pull out the rulebook, and go to great effort to ascertain that every last form is filled out and every last T is crossed. This slows things down enough to have the same effect as a strike.

Liberals adapted this trick for use involving things that had to be done that they didn’t want to do. Every liberal president since LBJ has utilized it at one time or another (Republican presidents don’t -- the GOP, whatever its other failings, takes the concept of responsibility seriously), though the most blatant example was Robert S. McNamara, the worst defense secretary in American history. McNamara picked it up as a vice-president at Ford. He didn’t care for a new 1958 model -- the Edsel -- and encouraged lower management let things slide while assuring his bosses everything was going fine. He bore large responsibility for the sales fiasco that ensued. He used the same method in Washington, resulting in such developments as the Vietnam War, the collapse of America’s military superiority over the USSR, and the ABM shutdown. McNamara didn’t care for any of those, and worked to rule on all of them.

Obama simply brought the McNamara formula up to date. He doesn’t want to curtail immigration, or abandon multiculturalism -- even temporarily -- or insult Mother Africa. So he has pulled out the rulebook and is intently studying every footnote. (So, evidently, has Ron Klain, who hasn’t been heard from since his appointment.) As in the 60s, the result has been near-catastrophic, which the naïve and fearful have mistaken for conspiracy, overlooking the fact that Obama’s stature has been a major casualty. 

Furthermore, it puts a spotlight on Obama’s entire record. The Obama of the plague narrative is a dreamer, a narcissist of little practical education and experience who sees the world in simple cartoonlike outlines and acts accordingly. Unable to imagine anything going wrong, incapable of either learning from past errors or responding to unforeseen demands. A man with no plan B. When things go south, he wanders off to the nearest golf course, leaving others to clean up.

This is the entire story of the Obama presidency. It explains the breakdown in race relations, ObamaCare, the “Arab Spring,” Benghazi, the Stimulus, and the Jihadi comeback, among many other examples.

We have asked ourselves repeatedly when people would wake up and smell the coffee. It is a terrible thing that it has taken a deadly disease to do it.

If this marks the end of the Obama presidency, as a number of observers have suggested, what comes next? We know that his mentality is that of a petulant child constantly striving for adult admiration. What happens when he is no longer able to attract attention? Will he then turn on the country as a whole, and do his best to damage what he cannot affect in any other way?

In truth, there doesn’t seem much to worry about. Any such attempt by Obama would as inept and ineffectual as his previous efforts to “transform” the U.S. We’ll see that hurt expression more often, the ladies at HuffPo will coo and gush, and there will certainly be plenty of golf. But anything worse we can dismiss. Obama simply isn’t capable of it. It’s time we put away the nightmare images of Barack Obama as the Beast 666, roaming the earth seeking that which he might devour. He’s not an American Lenin, or Mussolini, or Chavez. He’s just a hopped-up community organizer, in over his head and scarcely even aware of it, fit for hugging nurses and explaining that he would do if he was going to do anything.

It’s unlikely that Ebola will turn into a full-blown plague. For one thing, we have governors who can take over quarantine and security measures on the local level if that seems necessary (though you wouldn’t know it to look at the recent antics of Christie and Cuomo). It’s bad enough contemplating Ebola becoming endemic, as it is in Africa, popping up by mysterious means at irregular intervals. This is what happened with dengue in Texas, and is almost inevitable for immigrant-borne enteroviruses.

But it acts as a pure metaphor for the Age of Obama: failure, incompetence, willful negligence, dishonesty, the collapse of the elites, and utter indifference toward the public welfare. The Obama administration is now the chief victim of the plagues -- prostrate, fevered, bleeding from all orifices, little more than a paralyzed bag of pus. It needs to be isolated and quarantined. God knows what would happen if it spread.