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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28005 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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I will set aside how some or most viewed the Secret Service. But a decline in prestige? How long have they been paying attention? In any case, a brief history of recent Secret Service failures:

2009: Two party crashers — a couple — with thankfully no ill intent, sneak into Obama’s inauguration without credentials and shake his hand. Just put on some evening wear and a smile and you too can reach out and touch the president. No need for vetting.

2011: A bullet hole from a rifle round is discovered by a housekeeper at the White House. It turned out to have been fired four days prior, not that the Secret Service had previously noticed.

2012: Agents in Colombia are caught drinking and consorting with prostitutes just hours before being on duty.

2014: A knife-wielding looney jumps the White House fence. Is he confronted on the lawn? Hah, no. He reaches the East Room before he is apprehended.

2015: Two off-duty Secret Service agents, both drunk, one driving, collide with a security barrier at the White House.

2017: Another looney jumps the White House fence. He wanders the grounds for 16 minutes. No rush, fellas.

2019: A Chinese national with a flash drive full of malware passes through a Secret Service checkpoint. Thankfully the elite operators at Mar-a-Lago’s front desk confronted him.

2022: Two Secret Service agents are sent home from a trip to South Korea after getting in a drunken fight with a cab driver.

Something to consider is the context of the job and the timeframe.

You're talking about the same timeframe as the Global War on Terror. Secret Service types are generally all ex-cops or ex-mil. As your stories about USSS with colombian prostitutes and korean cab drivers point out, they have the machismo that goes along with these career fields.

Well, during GWOT, the Super Bowl of male badassery was being Special Operations in the military - specifically the SEALs (because if you don't write about a raid in a book, did the raid even happen?). If you're the archetypal 18-24 year old male between 2002/3 - 2016, and you want to go out and kick ass, you're joining the military (and likely ending up in the 82nd Airborne if you fail selection, lulz).

Those who joined USSS during this time period? Head scratcher. I can see family connection being a reason - "My dad was USSS / a cop, I'm going to do it too", I can see individual level hyperfixation on the job, but that wouldn't account for more than a few percentage points of applications.

Also, keep in mind that USSS is largely recruiting from the same pool as the FBI -- who do you think wins the battle for best candidates more often?

The point is - I think the USSS has a very hard recruitment problem on its hands. This is where someone should link the GIF of the husky gal from the trump assassination fiddling with reholstering her pistol and generally looking lost. And, remember, that was the Presidential detail. The one's "guarding" the White House when POTUS isn't in town ... that's gotta be a JV team if there ever was one.

Wasn’t she some sort of deputized local official? Having trouble finding anything on the subject.

But I generally agree. No idea what the pipeline to USSS looks like. Maybe all those armed IrS agents look for a career change during their midlife crisis?

Wasn’t she some sort of deputized local official?

If she was, then it's even more of a colossal leadership and organizational failure. All of the video suggests she was stage detail (i.e. closest to Trump). It would seem to me those should be the most experienced / trained / highest performed agents there.

Consider also that the decline in mythic quality from Ike-Kennedy-LBJ-Nixon to Dubya-Obama-Trump-Biden may impact willingness to take a bullet for the guy.

Biden

willingness to take a bullet strong breeze for the guy.

looney jumps the White House fence

These are the ones that really blow my mind. Some of the other stuff is genuinely difficult, but in these cases, we've got stuff like an incompetent Secret Service agent just getting straight up trucked by a crazy guy because she's too weak to do the basics of the job. Growing up, I thought that if you jumped the White House fence, you'd be immediately sniped, and if you weren't, you'd get blown up by mines, and if you danced around those, you'd get shredded by guard dogs. It turns out you just get confronted by a frail lady when you get to the door.

Ah, you should have started a little earlier!

2007: An academic is allowed to lead the President into the basement of Mount Vernon alone. Source

Do we even know if that was an academic? Or was it a terrorist or FBI agent that had undergone then cutting-edge plastic surgery in 1997.

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