Raise the drawbridge

John Derbyshire holds forth on our current self-inflicted crises:

The terrorist menace? Sensible border control and immigration policies would nullify, or at least minimize it. We are fools to allow settlement by Muslims. We shouldn’t even give visitor’s visas to them. Sure, sure: Very few Muslims are terrorists. Practically all terrorists are Muslims, though: there’s your raison d’état. Or there it would be, if we were still grown-up enough to acknowledge the concept of raison d’état.

And now, this ebola business. The Director of the Centers for Disease Control made a speech that was incoherent and stupid even by the dismal standards of today’s public officials. The gist of it, insofar as any gist could be extracted, was that restrictions on travel between one country and another are evil, and also fruitless:

"When a wildfire breaks out we don’t fence it off. We go in to extinguish it before one of the random sparks sets off another outbreak somewhere else."

One word, sir: firebreak.

Our government has apparently decided that it would be—gasp! swoon!—racist to ban incoming flights from West Africa, thereby declaring national adherence to the doctrine I once characterized as “better dead than rude.”

My reaction to both situations, the MENA mayhem and the ebola epidemic, is: Raise the drawbridge!

The fortunes of Kurds and Yazidis are of no importance to the U.S.A. It’s nothing to us whether Iraq remains one nation or splits into three. Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan: these trash can nations will never have any constitutional government, nor any economic, military, or cultural significance. Leave them alone, or at the mercy of their neighbors, to work out their own destinies. They are nothing to us.

Likewise with West Africa. The entire effect on the U.S.A. of a total ban on contacts with Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone would be a rise in the price of chocolate—not exactly an existential threat.

Raise the drawbridge!

Indeed. Then ready the boiling oil and crank the windlasses. They may laugh at our perverted and useless immigration controls, but we can quickly instill into them a mortal terror of Colt and cordite.