"The buck stops here" read the famous sign on President Harry Truman's Oval Office "Resolute" desk almost from the moment he was sworn in after FDR's death. In today's Washington, the buck flies around like a Super Ball in a bouncy house — which is just one of two reasons why disgraced Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle still has her job.
If Cheatle possessed the strength of character demanded by the position she holds, she'd have fallen on her virtual sword before the final gunshot had stopped ringing in people's ears.
Arguably worse, Presidentish Joe Biden hasn't fired Cheatle and shows no indication that he ever would. She's another DEI-supporting and-approved progressive woman with a Washington sinecure. That makes her, unlike the people her organization is assigned to protect, virtually bulletproof.
What message does that send, not just to other would-be assassins but to bad guys around the world?
"Go on and hit me with your best shot."
We've reached the point — and it took us less than four years to get here — where the Secret Service is a laughingstock.
At the end of the day, what really matters is that the Secret Service tried hard and had fun
— Aelfred The Great (@aelfred_D) July 16, 2024
The Service is supposed to deter with just its dark-suited, sunglassed, and manly presence. The Primary's immediate security detail — the people who provide cover when the bullets start flying — must be physically large and strong enough to cover the Primary completely with their bodies and manhandle him or her to a safe place without delay.
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But Cheatle and her ilk turned the USSS into a DEI project yet she has not been called to account, and her version of taking responsibility has been a laughably transparent excuse about the dangers of a "sloped roof."
Rather, it would be laughable had it not been for people like Corey Comperatore, James Copenhaver, and David Dutch, all killed or critically wounded in Thomas Matthew Crooks' preventable assassination attempt.
Cheatle is just one example.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas still has a job, in part, because not even the Republican-held House could be bothered to give him the impeachment he so richly deserves. The lack of buck-stopping is a bipartisan problem.
"Anyway, don't get me started" on Presidentish Joe Biden, as Biden himself might mumble. There is literally nothing he hasn't made worse, and if he held himself to the same standard John F. Kennedy did, he'd have quit the race already. It's an underappreciated fact that JFK confided to Bobby Kennedy that "I think I would have been impeached" by a Democrat Congress (!!!) had he not taken decisive action early on in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
"You had one job," goes the old meme. But in today's Washington, the only job is making damn sure you hold on to yours long enough to get the next, more powerful job. Failure is totally an option. During weeks — years? — like this one, it seems like almost a prerequisite.
In his 1953 farewell address, Truman explained what the sign on his desk meant. "The President — whoever he is — has to decide," Truman told America. "He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job."
But there is no single person acting as president of the United States and no place for the buck to stop.
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