Guess Who Came To Dinner?

I'll give Barack Obama this much: when he effectively ended the War on Terror, he put his own safety where his big, fat mouth was:

The couple who crashed a White House dinner shouldn't need legal help, an attorney who knows them said Thursday, as the Secret Service remained quiet publicly about the eye-catching security breach.

"They just went to a party. They didn't do anything wrong," Paul Morrison, a Virginia attorney who has represented Michaele and Tareq Salahi in the past, told The Associated Press.

A Secret Service investigation of the security breach, now under way, will help determine whether Morrison is right about the lack of legal liability. But the main focus was on the agency itself.

Edward Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman, acknowledged the officers at the checkpoint involved in clearance for the state dinner for visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did not follow proper procedure when the Salahis arrived and it was determined they had not been invited.

But he declined to reveal anything the Secret Service knows about what happened next.

During President George W. Bush's administration, it was standard procedure to have someone from the White House social office at the gate for state dinners and other events with large groups of visitors, according to a former senior Bush aide who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to be seen as criticizing the Obama White House.

The social office is most knowledgeable about the guest list and could have been called in case of any uncertainty, this official said.

White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, asked by the AP on Thursday whether personnel from her office were at the checkpoint said, "We were not."

So that's all it takes to get into an ObamaHouse state dinner? Just show up and bluff your way past the front door? You don't have to show ID or tickets or anything? Shinola, we couldn't have gotten into my daughter's high school drama club's production of Singing In the Rain without tickets. This was an unidentified couple being allowed to come into close physical proximity with the president of the United States.

Ron Kessler, who wrote a book this year on how the growing laxity and carelessness of the Secret Service is making another high-level tragedy more and more likely, scythes through all the heedless shrugging:

It’s clear from the Secret Service’s comment that the agency not only ignored the fact that the couple was not on the guest list but also did not do the usual background check to ensure that they were not possible threats. The party crashers could have had outstanding arrest warrants for murder. They could have been involved with terrorists. They could have been agents of Iran or North Korea. The Secret Service would never have known.

While the couple did pass through a magnetometer to detect weapons, they could have assassinated the president or vice president using other means—anthrax, for example. The additional security checks referred to by the Secret Service spokesman screen for such items as radiological contamination but would not detect secreted biological weapons.

What's most shocking about this little episode is not that the Salahis were allowed in without ID or background checks, but that they were even fed through the magnetometer at all:

As outlined in the Newsmax story Secret Service Is Putting the President at Risk, the corner cutting includes not putting people through magnetometers at all or shutting them down early when an event is about to start and staffs apply pressure to the Secret Service because attendees are waiting outside; cutting the size of counterassault teams; not keeping up to date with the latest firearms; and not even allowing agents time for regular firearms requalification or physical training, then covering that up by asking agents to fill out their own test scores....

What is needed is a shakeup of Secret Service management, including replacement of Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan with a director from the outside who will change the management culture. In addition, given the demands on it, the Secret Service’s $1.4 billion annual budget is pathetically small and should be doubled or tripled. What could be more important than protecting the president?

Indeed. Let me tell you what my worst nightmare about Barack Obama is. It's not that he got elected; if it hadn't been him, it would have been Hillary Clinton. The Dems were going to clean up in 2008 no matter who they nominated for president, just as inevitably as the backlash against them for their authoritarian overreach is going to be just as seismic a year from now. Nor is it the passage of his left-wing extremist agenda, which ended with Hogzilla back in February and will not see cripple & tax or BarryCare join the un-stimulus in the winner's circle.

Okay, my worst nightmare about Barack Obama is this....

....or an Iranian or North Korean EMP attack.

But the assassination of Barack Hussein Obama would be a close second.

Look no further than the legacy the Left wrote for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Remember that in today's political terms, the real JFK would have been at least a moderate Republican. He was a hawk on defense. He campaigned on Cold War policy by arguing that the Eisenhower Administration had been SOFT on the Soviets and allowed a "missile gap" (i.e. falling behind the USSR in number of ICBMs) to open up. He was tough on crime, and organized crime in particular. He became the first president since Calvin Coolidge to CUT income tax rates.

Then, just under a year before he'd have stood for re-election, he was gunned down in Dallas, Texas, as we all know. No sooner was he buried at Arlington National Cemetary than the left-wing propaganda mills start re-writing his legacy. Suddenly he was the second FDR, the patron saint of every liberal-left cause, and the reasonless justification for an explosion of government that could never have happened otherwise. You might even say JFK's assassination provided Lyndon Baines Johnson with the ultimate "crisis" to "exploit".

And exploit it he did. With the gargantuan, veto-proof majorities in both Houses of Congress his 1964 landslide swept into power, America was buried under the Great Society (the second leg of America's communization, after the New Deal) and saddled with a war LBJ both escalated and from which he then denied victory. He divided America worse than at any time since the Civil War and traumatized the U.S. military in the midst of our twilight struggle with the Evil Empire to such an extent that, under Jimmy Carter's clinically insane stewardship, the West nearly fell.

And all of it made possible by a careless Secret Service, a single Castroite, and three bullets.

Now picture the consequences if something were to happen to Barack Obama. See why I call it nightmarish?

And with the century-and-a-half-long history of American presidential assassinations, both attempted and successful, from which the organization is supposed to have learned, the 21st century Secret Service is reverting back to the competence level of John T. Parker, the White House guard who drank himself into a sodden stupor instead of guarding the presidential box at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865.

Protect that incompetent narcissist to the maximum extent humanly possible, gentlemen. America may or may not survive his presidential term, but his untimely demise will destroy this Republic for good.

UPDATE: The obligatory party-crasher photo with the Host of Hosts: