It is nice to occasionally hear reflected in the White House press pool what so many normal people have gleaned about this White House:

Two questions excerpted, from Roberta Rampton, who is with Reuters:

“Let’s take the case of the Pentagon. You talked about how the administration has been aware and has acted on an Ebola outbreak since March. And then shouldn’t these — shouldn’t a policy have been in place when you decided to send troops to West Africa? Shouldn’t — how you are going to treat those returning troops in a matter of a protocol then, rather than to what appears to be being made up on the fly?”…

“I’m confused tough because we have known about this outbreak for some time and we are going to hear as you say from CDC later on guidelines and protocols for returning medical workers which we know they were there. Why haven’t — and the Pentagon too in the case of these people who are being held or sort of semi-quarantined in Italy. Why weren’t these kinds of decisions made earlier?”

This represents more mainstreaming of the idea that these guys just don’t have what it takes to actually respond to crises. Most of us have found that obvious for quite some time, but it’s important when the press corps and “Saturday Night Live” start talking about it, as SNL did this weekend with a pretty sweeping indictment of a string of Obama administration failures, which Jazz blogged but is worth a watch if you missed it: