Archive for February 22nd, 2008



Surely someone at Secret Service is about to be promoted

It’s no secret that in George Bush’s Washington, incompetence and/or malfeasance seem to be prerequisites for really great promotions. George Tenet described dubious intelligence as a “slam dunk,” helping to pave the way for a tragically unnecessary war. For that mistake, he was given a shiny Medal of Freedom. John Negroponte, once involved in covering up Central American death squads and propping up a Honduran dictator, was pulled out of carbonite and awarded the post of Deputy Secretary of State. Condoleeza Rice didn’t think a memo stating “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the United States” was important. She was given the entire state department to run.

So it comes as no surprise that the United States Secret Service ordered the Dallas police department to stop checking the crowd for weapons at a Barack Obama rally. It’s getting harder and harder for the incompetents and the malicious to stand out in Washington. They’ve got to do something to shine, and letting another Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan slip into an Obama rally might just be stupid enough to work. Maybe.

What I want to know is, who at the Secret Service is bucking for promotion?

**UPDATE: I called the Secret Service. Secret Service Spokesman Ed Donovan acknowledged that screening of the crowd for weapons was halted about an hour before Barack Obama appeared. He said the Secret Service was following a “layered security plan,” which involved practices other than weapons-screening. “It wasn’t as if there was a decision to just stop checking people,” Donovan added. “It was never part of our plan to screen every member of the audience for weapons.” According to Mr. Donovan, the Secret Service tailors its protocols to each individual site, and this particular site didn’t require a thorough examination of the crowd. He wouldn’t detail the measures taken in Dallas that supposedly rendered individual searches unnecessary, saying that to do so would “help them defeat us.”

Whoever came up with a layered plan that doesn’t include running everyone in that stadium through a metal detector should start clearing a place on the mantle for his medal.