Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, is angry that President Obama isn’t doing enough to combat the spread of Ebola. He is also angry that Obama is sending U.S. troops on a relief mission to combat the spread of Ebola.
In an interview with the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg and Chris Gacek last week, Farenthold appeared to be unaware that the U.S. military has a long record of working in disaster response and relief missions and warned that sending U.S. troops to help confront the crisis could exacerbate the outbreak.
“Can you imagine bringing this disease back to the tight confines of a military base?” he asked.
“The military is designed and set up and trained to protect this country with guns and bombs, not to protect this country from disease,” he said. “If somebody wanted to protect this country by fighting disease in Africa, they could’ve joined the Peace Corps or USAID or Doctors Without Borders. We’re using the military for something that they weren’t designed for and I think putting our soldiers in an unnecessarily risky position.”
Farenthold then accused the Obama administration of trying to politicize the Ebola outbreak, telling listeners that they can’t trust government officials to handle Ebola because of Obamacare and Benghazi: “My major concern is that every piece of evidence that I’ve seem indicates that the Obama administration is more interested in politics than good health policy. I’m also concerned that we cannot believe the Obama administration, there’s a history of this administration misleading us from ‘if you like your health care insurance you can keep it’ to ‘Benghazi attacks were caused by a YouTube video’ to ‘we accidentally lost Lois Lerner’s email.’ The government is not being straight with us.”
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