Mission: Forgotten.

Mr. Philbin inquired whether I was intending to comment on last week’s failed attempt to murder the former president. I believe everyone on the planet has already done so, and as more information comes out and the Secret Service looks worse and worse, more will comment again (and ought to). Feet must be held to fires; swords must be fallen upon. Justice demands it.

And yet, I suppose we’ve come to expect that justice’s claims will go unanswered. As is typical now. The government is loaded with people who not only don’t accept the buck when passed, they also use buck-repellent on their gold-plated rears to prevent the buck ever arriving—however properly it should. Harry Truman is long absent. 

It’s of a piece with a blog entry I posted earlier this month about our supposed elites and their stupidity. As has been pointed out with appropriate vigor in many quarters, the Secret Service has opted to show its stupidity by forgetting its mission and picking up lesser missions instead. Instead of protecting the presidents and other key figures, they seek to indulge in social justice and social engineering, hiring candidates based on their potential to be girlboss action figures rather than their capacity to do the job. We have seen some results of this mission misdirection.

A similar situation has been going on in reverse in women’s competitions, where men dressed as women are pulverizing girls at sports and even winning beauty competitions. The mission—giving women an arena in which they can achieve greatness—has been thrown aside for silly concerns.

This has been going on in fire departments for decades. It became more important to get women in the firehouse than to have firefighters who could handle the often extreme physical challenges of the job. To enable social change, physical requirements had to be lowered. 

I asked a buddy who retired from a Manhattan NYFD firehouse if one of the highly touted female recruits had ever wound up in his unit. He said they were never assigned any, but he worked with some when he was on temporary loan to other houses. And no, they couldn’t do the job—they were just not strong enough, however fit. So the department would shuffle them into desk jobs. They will get the same cushy pension and Cadillac health plans as guys who'd spent 30 years dragging adults out of burning buildings. The situation is worse now under Mayor Eric Adams’s highly politicized fire chief, but that’s a long story.

It seems like way too many people believe the fish-out-of-water stories in which totally unqualified persons are put in difficult positions or authority, but succeed because they are clever and mean well. This assumes no job requires any knowledge or expertise. Anyone can do it with the right attitude, so why give it to some old white dude who’s spent his life in the field? The mission will be accomplished. And if not, we tried real hard!

I'm not just blaming the women involved, mind you -- I'm blaming everyone for forgetting the purpose of the job. And having an all-men squad is definitely no guarantee of getting these jobs done. It was only in 2012 that Secret Service agents were found to be spending more time getting loaded and banging prostitutes overseas than focusing on their duties (“Wheels up, rings off”). And again, that’s forgetting the mission, just for different priorities. 

This is where we are in America right now: Everyone wants to do everything but the damn job that he's supposed to be doing. You'd think that wouldn't be too much to ask for any job, let alone one that prides itself on duty and honor, but apparently we're choosing to be too stupid -- not to mention too selfish -- to live.