[jwplayer player=”1″ mediaid=”73906″]
“The wheels of Obama’s bus are tall, and roll over obstacles easily,” Ace quips:
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said he accepted her resignation and he named Deputy Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to lead an investigation into the Sept. 19 incident in which authorities say Omar Gonzalez scaled the White House fence, made it into the executive mansion and overpowered an officer before being subdued by a second officer.
Mr. Johnson also said he’s convening a panel of independent experts to report back on changes needed at the troubled Secret Service.
…
She was the first female director of the elite security service.
That above link goes to the Washington Times; at least they mentioned Pierson’s gender, with the implication that it likely — very likely — caused her to get the gig in the first place, in the wake of the Secret Service’s embarrassing frat boy antics in recent years. Contrast that with Washington Times’ elite crosstown rivals on the other side of the aisle, as Charles C.W. Cooke wrote yesterday:
Yesterday afternoon, much to my eternal humiliation, I fell foul of a parody account on Twitter. Responding with false outrage to a Washington Post story on a lunatic who managed to barge his way into the White House, the joke feed “@Salondotcom” took aim at the reporting of basic facts, contending in jest that the truth should be covered up lest it upset anyone sensitive. In the ostensibly offensive passage, the Post had recorded that “the female officer posted inside the front door appeared to be delayed in learning that the intruder, Omar Gonzalez, was about to burst through.” “No, WaPo,” Salondotcom responded with mock indignation, “it doesn’t matter that the officer the White House intruder got past was a woman.” Accustomed as I am to precisely this sort of nonsense, I presumed the tweet was real and I linked to it earnestly. Congratulations to J. Arthur Bloom and his impressively fertile imagination. You got me.
And yet, as subsequent events have demonstrated, the joke was bang on. As a part of its gag, @Salondotcom took a screenshot of the post and highlighted the word “female” within the sentence, thereby establishing that, in an ideal world at least, newspapers would prefer androgyny to accuracy. Just a few hours later, fiction became fact, the description being removed entirely from the Post’s piece. Parody had outpaced reality.
As it always does, particularly when it has such fertile material to work with in this administration and its palace guard.
Regarding the former: “FLASHBACK: Secret Service Missed Fake Interpreter Charged With Murder on Stage With Obama During Mandela Funeral,” Katie Pavlich reminds us today at Townhall.
Regarding the latter, its real palace guard, Charles Cooke has you covered there, as well today: NYT: Say, Why Don’t Republicans Want President Obama to be Killed?
An extraordinary item from Peter Baker in the New York Times:
WASHINGTON — President Obama must be touched by all the concern Republicans are showing him these days. As Congress examines security breaches at the White House, even opposition lawmakers who have spent the last six years fighting his every initiative have expressed deep worry for his security.
“Even”? Can it really be too difficult to recognize that citizens who strongly disagree with the president of the republic don’t want him to be murdered? Is the moral imagination of the center-left truly so barren as to presume as a matter of course that vehement and caustic political opposition must, eventually, lead to execution?
I hope the Russians love their children, too. As Cooke writes, “Of course we want the president to be safe. Those who are surprised by this perhaps need to spend some more time with their ideological opponents, or — and this will be harder, I grant — spend a little more time examining what it is about their ideology that led them to conflate political opposition and violence in the first instance.”
Update: “Exclusive: Secret Service missed man with gun in elevator with Obama,” from Susan Crabtree yesterday in the Washington Examiner:
A man with a gun that the Secret Service did not know about rode in an elevator with President Obama during his visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Sept. 16.
The previously undisclosed breach, confirmed by two sources familiar with the case, raises new questions about the agency’s ability to protect the president.
The incident, which took place three days before an intruder jumped a fence and sprinted inside the White House, involved a failure in Secret Service advance work to prevent an armed man from coming into close proximity with Obama while he was visiting the CDC to receive a briefing about the Ebola threat.
The threat to the president appeared minimal, but the incident alarmed agents on site and exposes a breakdown in several important Secret Service security protocols, the sources say.
The information comes the same day Secret Service Director Julia Pierson appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and lawmakers publicly upbraided her for three hours about the Sept. 19 White House security breach, among other problems at the agency.
Curiously, unlike the IRS scandal, the Obamacare rollout, and Benghazi, this was apparently the one time that the Obama administration “read about something in the paper,” as they usually say to offhandedly downplay the myriad of disasters and scandals embroiling the inept administration, to fire someone:
WH confirms WH didnt know about elevator breach until “shortly before it was reported.” This is key to understanding why Pierson is out.
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 1, 2014
Join the conversation as a VIP Member