Remember the emotional gambits used to sell ObamaCare? I do. I still laugh at the nonsensical stupidity of some of them -- like appealing to our heartstrings with examples like the woman who claimed she’d been forced to wear her dead sister’s dentures. Or Sandra Fluke’s soulful appeal for her coed friends who didn’t have a spare $9 a month for birth control pills.

Fall for tales like this in haste. Repent at leisure.

The president has just rewritten ObamaCare regulations to now require insurers cover (very expensive) transgender operations.

These coverage provisions -- instead of the major medical coverage for serious illnesses most of us would prefer were we given a choice -- continue to drive up the cost of mandatory medical insurance.(Maryland’s Care First, for example, just announced an up to 26%  rate increase.)  

At the same time Britain’s NHS (one of the left’s hallowed models of a single-payer plan) is denying efficacious cancer medications to those who need it on the grounds the medication is too expensive. Should the tacked-on mandatory coverage provisions increase here, we can either deposit all our GNP into covering healthcare costs or watch as the less politically connected sufferers die of treatable ailments. Money really doesn’t grow on trees.

Just maybe if a then-Democrat Congress had asked themselves whether the people they represent wanted cancer treatment coverage or pills for Flukes and sex-change operations, their choice would have been different.

Fiscal lunacy on the part of government is nothing new. Neither is corruption as the unfolding Hillary email scandal underlines.

What is particularly appalling about the ill-informed Western elites is how their policies are practically ensuring the end of Western Civilization. They refuse to acknowledge the need for border security --sovereignty -- and allow, if not encourage the wholesale influx of third-world immigrants (who do not wish to assimilate) into states with generous welfare policies.

This week’s heart tug was the picture of a young drowned child whose Syrian family had tried to sail from Turkey to Greece to escape the mayhem there. Understandably, it hurt. But the crisis was created in no small part by the administration’s grandiose notions of an Arab Spring, a notion that has destabilized the entire Middle East. It was exacerbated by the dimwit policies of a largely borderless Europe addicted to multiculturalism and generous welfare schemes.

An article on Declinations.com by a man of Armenian descent whose own family history includes ruthless Turkish genocide, sets it forth clearly:

But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?

Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millennia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.

There are good Muslims in the world, and I want to make this clear. My own family lived only because an Ottoman official warned my great-grandfather that genocide was coming. This man, whose name I cannot remember -- something that genuinely pains me, for my grandfather died when I was young and his stories are almost dream-like to me, now -- paid for the ticket to America for my family, for English language lessons, and everything else needed to escape before it was too late.

I hope that I will meet this good and righteous man in the life to come. I hope God saw fit to accept him into His kingdom.

But Islam nonetheless is a contagion, even if some maintain a stubborn moral immunity to the infection. Where Islam goes, this violence will follow. You will never save all the little boys, you will never stop the slaughter. All you will do is bring it to your own shores.

And if there is something I know for certain, it is that my ancestors did not escape Islam only to see their descendants fight it again, once more in their own homes.

Not one of the rich Gulf States has offered to take in a single Syrian refugee. The U.S., which already spends one billion dollars a year on refugee resettlement and countless more in welfare benefits, is being asked to take in more of these refugees. This would further burden those already at the bottom of the labor market.

Either the West turns them away or it ceases to exist. It’s that simple. The EU and the U.S. had the chance to fight on foreign soil or accept an invasion of their own lands, and chose poorly. Their choice now is to refuse social welfare benefits, scratch multiculturalism, and require assimilation instead of kowtowing to demands for disparate treatment, or die.

This result is not one unforeseen. Over four decades ago, this development was foreseen among others by Jean Raspail, a French author, of The Camp of the Saints, a novel of Europe being overrun by refugees from the Third World. The left’s favorite hate group designator, the Southern Poverty Law Center, attacked the author, the book, and its publishers. “The book is a racist fantasy about an invasion of France and the white Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees, "a haunting and prophetic vision,"SPLC says, "of Western Civilization overrun by a burgeoning Third World population." 

Some fantasy. At the moment about 300,000 immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa have poured into Europe:  

More than 300,000 people have crossed into Europe by sea -- most of them from Libya to Italy or from Turkey to Greece -- and 2,600 have died in the attempt. Thirty to 40 drowned Friday after a boat carrying more than 120 Somalis, Sudanese and Nigerians deflated off the coast of Libya.

The migrants who manage to get to Greece must then begin a difficult trek across Macedonia and Serbia before sneaking into Hungary in hopes of getting, eventually, to preferred destinations like Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, which are prosperous, offer the chance for jobs and have been more welcoming than other nation.

The pictures show the immigrants are almost entirely men and young boys and once they’ve been granted asylum, there surely will be a call to admit their wives and children and parents and other family members, most of whom will require substantial social welfare services. If history is a guide, most will be inassimilable and reside in self-contained ghettoes, demanding ever more concessions for benefits and special treatment,

Even the processing of these immigrants is beyond the resources available as each country tries to fend for itself despite EU meddling and demands:  

 Recently, Nick Cooke-Priest, captain of the British vessel involved in the rescue mission, HMS Bulwark, told reporters that ‘the indications are that there are 450,000 to 500,000 migrants in Libya who are waiting’ to reach Italy. The British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said ‘We could see hundreds of thousands trying to cross this summer.’ Fabrice Leggeri, the head of the EU’s border agency Frontex, has put the figure even higher, at ‘between 500,000 and a million’. So huge are the numbers that Italian police often just dump coach loads of migrants in town squares or at main railway stations which are then turned into temporary camps. Government policy is to try and spread the migrants out throughout the peninsula to lessen their impact; but now many regional and town councils (of all political persuasions), especially in the north, are in open revolt and refusing to take any more. Scabies is rife (of 46,000 migrants tested this year, 4,700 were infested) and one in four migrants is said by doctors to have Hepatitis C. The anti-immigration vote is rocketing and the Italian left has taken a hammering in the recent regional and city elections.

The EU -- urged on in particular by an increasingly desperate Italy and Greece -- is trying to draw up a quota deal to distribute the huge migrant army; but as with the single currency, when push comes to shove, it is every nation for itself. Despite months of talks, there are few signs of an agreement even on the small numbers being bandied about. A couple of months ago, there was much talk about UN sanctioned military action by the EU to stop the smugglers’ boats putting to sea from the Libyan coast. For weeks now, the silence on that subject has been deafening.

The French have ‘closed’ their border with Italy on the Côte d’Azur in defiance of the Schengen Agreement, which guarantees free movement within member nations. They are rigorously checking trains, cars and even footpaths across the mountains, and sending any illegal migrants back to Italy; they say they have sent back 6,000 this year. The justification is simple: the Italians are failing to identify these people and distinguish economic migrants from refugees. Who can argue with that? The Austrians are doing the same at the Brenner Pass in the Alps.

Ordinary Europeans, in recognition of the nitwit policies of the EU, are fed up. In Sweden the nationalist party is ahead in the polls for the first time: 

Italy’s Matteo Renzi is openly battling with the EU on the refugee crisis. The Dublin convention “should be changed,” Renzi said, insisting the current chaos in Libya -- from where many of the boats depart -- is “Europe’s responsibility in light of the (military) intervention four years ago” by NATO to help rebels unseat the dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Greece, with enormous fiscal problems, is echoing the same complaints. The Schengen open border accord is under fire and a number of countries, including Germany have reinstituted border controls.

And the poor refugees? Some are complaining of boring monotonous Italian food (!) and demanding they be served the food of their homelands. 

Maybe they’d prefer Calais, France where a Michelin restaurant chef is preparing three-course meals with imported spices for the immigrants to make them feel more at home and where the government has installed almost 200 power points for recharging their mobile phones so they can call home.