Bill O‘Reilly, host of Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” thinks it isn’t fair to blame President Barack Obama for everything that’s gone wrong during the Ebola crisis, including the fact that the Dallas nurses got sick. But he told Fox News’ White House correspondent Ed Henry that there was one thing that was 100 percent the president’s fault: the lack of a travel ban.
O’REILLY: I don’t think it’s fair to blame President Obama… for two nurses contracting Ebola. I mean, the guy is the president of the United States, the hardest job in the world. He’s got to have confidence in the CDC to handle these things…
But the travel ban is absolutely the president’s fault. With one stroke of the pen– he’s got the pen and the phone, remember that, Henry– he can say we don’t accept visas and passports from the Ebola areas in West Africa until we get things sorted out here. He can do that in a heartbeat. He hasn’t done it and his administration, I believe, is telling [CDC Director Tom] Frieden this preposterous stuff. He is the puppet; Frieden is the puppet for them.
HENRY: And even Bill Maher and Jay Carney are not suggesting if not an outright travel ban there need to be bigger restrictions and that’s quite interesting because that suggests that even the folks on the left, people normally aligned with the president say, look, deal with the problem here within the United States, but what about these planes that are coming over from west Africa? Now the administration’s answer is they have severe restrictions. We know one person got through the restrictions by lying that they know of.
O’REILLY: That’s absurd. As I said to the president of the flight attendants unit. To think civilians can diagnose the disease at an airport when they, you know — I just — it’s just insane! You do what you can do to protect the public, and you can do that and [that] they don’t do it drives me crazy.