We all know the case of Andrew Speaker, the 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer who contracted a highly infectious form of tuberculosis and was able to slip back into the U.S. from Europe via Canada...Speaker did it once. Amado Isidro Armendariz Amaya, a businessman from Juarez, ...did it 76 times — with the full knowledge of the Mexican government and, apparently, our own...while infected with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), a highly contagious form of the disease...Armendariz's condition was known by the Mexican government for at least five years...[and] by our government at the time of the June hearings on the Speaker case...But Department of Homeland Security employees were warned they'd be fired if the Armendariz case became public knowledge...Why was DHS hiding this information from Congress and the American people?...The airlines on which Armendariz flew...have so far refused to answer whether Homeland Security or Centers for Disease Control officials warned them that a passenger with an infectious disease...was a frequent flier. They cite passenger privacy concerns...Our concern is that our government was so lax about a known health threat from a foreign country....Germ Warfare, Editorial, Investor's Business Daily, 10/18/2007
You can almost hear the prissy little bureaucrat in the background: "don't be alarmed by someone who has skin eruptions and a fever of 104; relax if someone threatens to kill you; be supportive of radical ideas, even if they involve blowing up skyscrapers; don't disturb our other passengers; don't upset our tickets reservation business; don't prejudge a serial killer; don't embarrass the bureau...". Like it or not, Nanny State is in charge of a big chunk of what we like to think of as national security.
At the writer's grandfather's arrival in Detroit in 1912 on The Empress of Ireland, in a scene nicely duplicated in Francis Copolla's Godfather, Part II, if an arrival showed any signs of an infectious disease he or she was put in quarantine. Why do you suppose that was? Was it a vast white conspiracy to imprison Eastern European Jews, or southern Italians, or the sixth wave of the abandonment of Ireland (now substantially reversed since Ireland joined the modern world)? Or did it have something to do with the idea that if a sick foreigner wanted to live here, he or she had to get well first. It was not considered unwelcoming to prevent that person's settlement so long as they could infect and kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people. This was rational policy. The subsequent in-migration of those who had been quarantined contains the fathers and mothers of some very wealthy Eastern European Jews, southern Italians, sixth wave Irish, and millions of others who decided that the first order of business was to become American, whatever that took, and then to take advantage of the system of political and religious liberty, free labor and capital to advance individual and family.
Under the Nanny state, this no longer obtains. Now, when someone arrives, the first observation required is not whether or not the person has a highly communicable disease, such as typhus, or dengue fever, but whether or their status as victim merits inclusion in the socialist Democrat party. This is hardly an exaggeration. Twenty years ago, good friends of the writer's father sought to bring a successful German business family to Florida. They had millions of deutschmarks in investment capital for restaurants they wanted to open (and had a century of experience in running in Germany). They had nary a trace of criminal backgrounds. In fact, since they were Jewish, they were also free of the Nazi taint. As survivors of the nightmarish regime of East Germany, they had long credentials as resistors to communist tyranny. Most of all, they had generations of successful entrepreneurship as background. INS turned them down. They were also turned down on appeal. Why? They weren't oppressed. They didn't have AIDS. They weren't unskilled. They weren't poor. They didn't, in other words, qualify for any of the benefits that being members of the socialist Democrat party entails.
The writer's mother, who was in a wheelchair for the last ten years of her life, after 9/11, was stopped on virtually every flight to and from Florida for extensive searching by airport "security" personnel. While she was searched, the writer's father reported, dozens of men who would obviously fall under the interested eye of security looking out for Arab terrorists, were not even asked to open their briefcases.
This is the Nanny state in action. This is Hillary Clinton redux. Pay attention.
Luther
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