Things fall apart; the center does not hold
There were two institutions that commanded towering respect and trust—amounting almost to reverence—in my youth: NASA and the Secret Service.
NASA lost its good reputation almost three decades ago, with the Challenger disaster and the agency’s bad decisions that were revealed during the investigation of the reasons for the explosion.
Now, during the last couple of years, the Secret Service has seemed more like the Keystone Cops, only nowhere near as funny.
Which brings us to the following question: how on earth did this security breach ever get so far?
I hate to sound callous, but if you are an unauthorized person running towards the president’s person or the White House, you go down. You don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
I think the officers may have gotten spooked by the uproar over the woman police officers killed in October of 2013 after she rammed a White House barrier and led them on a high-speed chase. My guess is that they don’t want a repeat and they’ve backed off on firing so readily. But if so, they’re over-correcting, although they got lucky this time. And the assertion that the man wasn’t armed (actually, he had a small knife, but it’s unlikely he meant to use it) is ridiculous. Arms are not always visible.
Most of the people who act like this are going to be the mentally ill, and many are harmless, but at present there is no way to distinguish those from the ones with evil intent. So the Secret Service had better find a way to deal with this sort of thing, and pronto.
Dogs, tasers, whatever; I’m not the expert, they’re supposed to be.
UPDATE 6:11 PM: The guy who got to the door of the White House doesn’t sound so harmless after all. After all, everybody in Washington DC carries a machete in his/her car, just in case, right?
Maybe they thought it was like the southern border and people that come across the fence are supposed to be welcomed and given the run of the place.
A fish rots from the head down. Reportedly, both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton frequently demeaned the S.S. personnel assigned to them. I’d be surprised if that isn’t also the case with Michelle. On the other hand, I imagine that Obama doesn’t even notice the ‘little people’.
The head of the Secret Service is a woman appointed by Obama, which didn’t need Congressional approval, who has little to no field experience. She’s an administrator and former chief of staff for the prior head of the agency. Which means she gets little respect from the ‘troops’.
In March of this year, on a trip by Obama to the Netherlands for an international summit, ‘Three members of the president’s protective detail were dismissed from the trip after one passed out drunk in a hallway of Obama’s hotel.’
Nor is it just the Secret Service.
DHS and ICE Morale Continue to Plunge
A fish rots from the head down.
Well they’ve got SAM missiles and TOE missiles up on the White House roof. Just drop the aiming point. Nothing like a smoldering crater with scattered body parts in the lawn pour encourger les autres.
Re NASA: here’s a site that has links to various former NASA scientists taking their old agency to task for abandoning scientific principles for political advocacy for the Left:
http://climatism.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/former-nasa-scientists-reject-global-warming-crisis/
“Over the past few years, large numbers of former NASA scientists have spoken out publicly, on the issue of climate change.
“In 2012, a group of 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts wrote a letter in dispute of climate change. Fed up with the alarmist, unscientific and activist position their former employer has taken on the theory of human-induced global warming.
“In 2013, a group of 20 ex-NASA scientists concluded that the science used to support the man-made climate change hypothesis is not settled and no convincing physical evidence exists to support catastrophic climate change forecasts.”
Of course it didn’t make the “news” either time.
NASA is like a money laundering scheme for Leftist corporations and environmental groups.
in October of 2013 after she rammed a White House barrier and led them on a high-speed chase.
Did you look at the video? She did not hit the barrier at all, she was curving out of it and then got stuck. Then accelerated backwards unto the main road, and that’s why they shot and killed her and tried to eliminate the occupants.
They had surrounded her vehicle when the damn vehicle was already stopped and started pointing the guns. That’s what set off panic in people that are under medication, with a child to protect, or under confused or mental issues.
The barrier was not hit at all, except the barrier to those who Do Not Know Their Place in DC.
Their total bullshi only works on people with no access to their own independent video analysis of the incidence.
Dogs, tasers, whatever; I’m not the expert, they’re supposed to be.
We’re the experts. They’re paid to go to foreign whore houses by Michelle Obama’s all black star team.
She’s an administrator and former chief of staff for the prior head of the agency. Which means she gets little respect from the ‘troops’.
Hussein O’s household troops. Back in feudal times, aristocrats only hired troops loyal to the family, while everyone else, even with better experience or merit, were fired. This often led to conflicts that were internally orientated, not externally orientated, since trust was the deciding factory in betrayals while merit and skill was the deciding factor against external enemies.
neo…
In Islamist circles this is known as a probing attack.
The use of the mentally ill was THE classic AQ gambit in Iraq.
So why change now?
Blert,
Why would the jihadists want to probe the residence of their most powerful enabler? That makes no sense. One day soon there will be somalis taking hostages and tweeting beheading videos from the mall of America. You can take that to the bank.
Maybe the SS got confused and just thought it was the guy that delivers the coke and pot.
Why would the jihadists want to probe the residence of their most powerful enabler? That makes no sense.
They are out of the loop. Even ISIL said they wanted to plant their flag on the White House. Even though they already have…
Islamos are kind of strategically dumb. They haven’t even set up FOBs in Mexico yet, even though they have the manpower, cash, and education (Western educated nit wits) that can translate Spanish.
parker…
Not every Muslim is on the same page.
AQ has had Bush and Soetoro on it’s kill list for years.
The only one given a pass is Biden. AQ considers him a drunken dufus, and as politically significant as a waste basket.
As to how they came to that appraisal, who can say?
&&&
If Islamists were to go after the White House, one would expect them to mimic ISIS.
It’s technique, seen in Iraq just yesterday, is to use waves of false-flagged suicide troops.
Consequently, it’s my considered opinion that the White House — and most of Federal Washington — needs to have a drastically deeper perimeter, in effect a “Green Zone” for DC.
Towards that end, all of the properties near the White House are going to have to become occupied elements of an integrated defense complex… sort of an American “Forbidden City” — ala Beijing. (circa 1900)
The ONLY way that America can go back to past norms is to go back to past norms: all Muslims must be ejected from the nation.
They are simply incompatible with the US Constitution and our government. They are religiously dedicated to its destruction, all of them. They, individually, only differ as to means, and to the tempo.
It’s quite impossible to be a observant Muslim and a lawful American citizen. It’s a null set.
Islam, per se, is not even a religion as it was conceived by the Founding Fathers.
Thomas Jefferson bought that famous Koran because he was at war with the north African Muslim states.
America was at war with/ engaged in hostilities/ payoffs from the very first with those Muslim states.
Bizarrely, Bush and Soetoro, both, have totally flipped the historical record.
Religion of peace, my eye!