Secret Service Lacking Direction

3

October 1, 2014 by JImbo

 

Secret Service Director Resigns

What? No Lois Lerner tantrums and pleading the fifth?

No drama?

No lying under oath and then retiring before you can be prosecuted?

I’m so disappointed!

Seriously though, she was totally scapegoated. I don’t blame her for the fiasco…entirely. She was just doing what she thought the boss wanted.

Similarly, the Secret Service agents can’t really be blamed for following orders. Even if they weren’t direct orders, what was expected could be inferred pretty easily from past experience.

Consider it from the agents’ point of view. They had a visibly unarmed guy, probably mentally crazy, running towards the White House. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard “WELL THEY SHOULD HAVE SHOT HIM!!!”

This has oddly come from both sides of the aisle. I never knew unjustified murder was such a bipartisan issue!

Yes, MURDER. The man posed no visible threat. You can’t just say “This area we will kill you in.” You need a REASON.

Self defense doesn’t include property. That’s why people go to jail for shooting robbers in their homes. You can’t shoot someone to protect your TV (or the White House furniture.) You have to be PERSONALLY THREATENED.

The agents were not personally threatened. The man had a pocket knife, but it wasn’t out or visible. He was for all visible purposes unarmed.

Do YOU want to be the guard that SHOOTS AN UNARMED MAN IN THE BACK? Think about what we’ve gone through.

Do you want to be the white guy who shoots a minority dude in full view at the WHITE HOUSE a few weeks after the riots in Ferguson, Missouri? I sure as hell wouldn’t shoot.

The White House was empty at the time. Just the Secret Service guards were there. They had no President or family to protect. There was nothing there but guards and an empty house.

What are you defending? The guy isn’t going anywhere. He’s running into a house full of agents. He’s GONNA be stopped eventually.

Why shoot? Why risk it? They KNOW the President would NOT have their back if anything went wrong.

The troops in Afghanistan and Iraq get courts-martialed if they shoot first.

The Border Patrol agents who enforce our laws get FIRED.

The cops who follow the rules are being reprimanded, called names by the President and the Justice Dept pressures their chiefs to fire them.

Now, the forced “resignation” of the Director of the Secret Service just shows that she’s going to have to fall on her sword to protect the President’s image too.

Those guards were most definitely thinking they would be brought up on charges or tossed in prison if they screwed up. They were NOT about to go to jail for this guy, President or not. There was simply no justification to do anything but exactly what they did.

(Well they could have released the guard dogs. Not sure what happened there. Maybe they were on break? Dunno)

What was the worst that would happen if they didn’t shoot and let what happened happen? Well we’ve seen the “worst”…nothing. The boss gets fired. Big whoop.

We know now there have been MANY assaults on the White House, and they even let a convicted felon with a gun near the President. (How he got on the payroll as a security guard for a government agency is another question to ask…)

Apparently people weren’t getting fired for breaking laws left and right.

No one got fired when they were caught with hookers and cocaine in a hotel room on duty.

No one was fired when someone with a rifle shot up the White House.

No one was fired the last few times someone made it onto the White House grounds.

So why should they bother to shoot? They did what made sense. They followed the law and made a good take-down with no one hurt.

Why is everyone treating this as some failure? I’d say it was a success. If things had happened the way the political pundits wanted, there would be a dead, basically unarmed veteran laying in a pool of blood surrounded by Secret Service agents who would shortly be going to prison.

How can anyone think that’s a GOOD result?