In case you foolishly thought that Ebola was a medical epidemic requiring our sharpest medical minds to find medical answers quickly, the president is here to disabuse you of that notion. If the president perceived it as a medical crisis, he would have appointed a person of medicine, preferably with an expertise in infectious diseases and the spread of epidemics, to spearhead the administration’s response.

Instead, a lifelong bureaucrat with the bluest of blue political credentials is the person selected to confront Ebola as one of the most potentially catastrophic health risks we have ever faced.  I know almost nothing about Ron Klain, and no doubt he is an able and dedicated Democrat administrator, though this does not bring me any comfort. We have increasingly been in the grip of similar Democrat administrators for the last six years, and they’ve done their best to poison the country with their idiocy. I don’t suggest that Mr. Klain is an incompetent, only that he comes from a long line of them. Perhaps he will surprise us all, despite his utter lack of expertise in the problem he has seemingly been assigned to conquer.

What the appointment of Mr. Klain tells us is that, instead of this disease being a medical issue, the president and his advisors view it as a political one, needing the deft touch of an experienced political operative. Ebola is, to President Obama, a political risk, rather than a danger to the population of the United States. Considering all the president’s other decisions regarding Ebola and how to confront it, indeed regarding every other threat to the safety of the United States, this makes perfect sense.

President Obama is not really interested in the United States, or what is best for it. We know he is much happier accusing, criticizing and punishing it. Thus, when every other responsible nation on Earth imposes a travel ban to keep infected people from poisoning a nation, he refuses to do so as well. This would offend Africans who are infected with Ebola, you see, and those anonymous feelings vastly outweigh the risk to Americans in Liberal Land. Apparently the president does not want to be as low in the polls in Africa as he is here. 

He sends American troops to Africa to treat Ebola, where some are sure to be infected, but won’t send them to our border to protect us from cartels, terrorists, and illegal migrants with felony records. Countless men, women, and children have been beheaded, mutilated, and massacred while he pretends to fight Islamic terrorism, but he purposefully refuses to remove the gloves. After all, what if ISIS was actually defeated? How could he explain that to his America-hating base while they tour Iran courtesy of the New York Times and ecstatic ayatollahs?

Why is it that nothing this president does ever appears calculated to actually solve the problem before him? For instance, a serious and thoughtful person would not solve the problem of a bridge on the verge of failure by assigning a public relations firm to prepare architectural plans to shore it up. They lack the expertise to address the actual problem. A public relations firm, however, might be very adept at trying to convince us that the bridge is not really as decrepit as it looks, and that all it needs are some meetings, study groups and fundraisers. The problem of the bridge needs to be managed, massaged and eventually dismissed as nothing at all. After all, when the bridge finally does collapse, someone else will take the hit.

In everything this president does, we see a cynical and fraudulent response, sounding like care and concern, but empty of substance and real meaning. Remember the scene on Martha’s Vineyard this year, at which the president put on his earnest face and spoke of a beheading, and was on the golf course eight minutes later, yucking it up with friends? How is the appointment of Ron Klain any different? 

Mr. Klain is a bureaucrat with no relevant expertise in illness, disease, its spread, or its eradication. Knowing nothing about the problem, he cannot formulate targeted and immediate responses to arrest and overcome the enemy. Unless, of course, we are that enemy. Certainly that is how this president has always viewed those of us who saw through his absurd image from the outset, and wanted a person of substance in case integrity was needed, as it always is of a president. Character can’t be faked forever, and his opponents have known these days were coming. 

If we view the appointment of Mr. Klain from that perspective, rather than to pretend the president seeks real solutions to tough problems, then we can understand that Mr. Klain’s role is actually to protect the president from us. Mr. Klain will earnestly say the right things, and appear to be doing something meaningful, but we must understand that his assignment is not to defeat Ebola. It is to manage the public relations of the crisis in a way that protects and insulates the president from blame, or from commitment to difficult policy decisions that are against the wishes of his donors, who seem to think that Ebola is a problem of race, not of illness or contagion. Mr. Klein is skilled at nothing else relevant to this crisis.

Thus, Mr. Klain comes to the table necessarily pretending certain things. For one thing, he must pretend that he is determined to defeat Ebola rather than decisiveness and accountability. He must also pretend that he is someone who will accomplish his mission objectively and honestly, rather than as the president’s front man in this assignment. How has that worked out for the last 6 years with every member of the cabinet? Or in charge of the Secret Service?  Or the NLRB or the EPA, or anything to which Obama has ever appointed anyone?    

What will predictably follow, as it has so many times before, is a downward spiral of abject failure, and people will once again die for this president’s self-interest. The president has chosen to appoint a political operative, allegedly to solve a medical problem, with politics at the forefront of everything he does. Just as the prejudices and delusions of the left have brought about our military rules of engagement, requiring our troops to die first, their rules of engagement against Ebola will entirely miss the mark because they will have been invented to fight the wrong war. A negative political perception is not the threat. The most vulnerable person in all of this is not President Obama. It is every American who lives in the increasingly dangerous world Obama’s vision has created.