According to former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, a frustrated President Barack Obama has given up on leading. World events refuse to break his way. Commentator Dan Balz opined on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program that the Ebola epidemic reflects “this notion” that global events are spinning out of control.

Yeats, in his post-WWI poem “The Second Coming,” wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”