March 23, 2015--The Wall We Need

The wall we need is not the one we've been talking about for well over a year--Donald Trump's "beautiful" wall along the border with Mexico. The wall for which he in a delusion assured us Mexico would pay.

We now discover that Mexico understandably continues to see this to be offensive and is so furious about the way they are being treated by President Trump that they have virtually severed relations with us.

We also discovered that the budget Trump submitted to Congress last week--the one received by both parties as "dead on arrival"--includes about $4.0 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to pay for the first phase of wall building. There is not a word about Mexico anteing up.

If we want to assess if a wall of this kind will be effective in shutting down illegal border-crossing, we need look no further than how well the various walls Israel has erected to contain the movement of Palestinians have worked.

Two years ago as Palestinian rockets rained down on Israel, fired from Gaza, the Israeli army discovered dozens of elaborate smugglers' tunnels under the fence, tunnels in many cases that were electrified and included lights and even air conditioning.

But there is one thing we can be certain about--the security fence that circles the White House is equally ineffective.

Evidence for that is the revelation last week that someone jumped that fence as if it weren't there and managed to elude Secret Service agents for a full 17 minutes before he was spotted and captured. He apparently had made his way right up to a White House entrance and was fiddling with the doorknob in an attempt to enter the premises.

President Trump was in residence at the time and we can only suspect that when the SS finally learned about the intrusion they roused him from his bed and bundled him down to the bunker six floors below the East Wing.

The same "undisclosed location" where they hid Vice President Cheney on 9/11.

From an electronic sensor the Secret Service was alerted to the fact that there was an intruder, but they could not locate him on the White House grounds.

The White House sits on only18 acres and one would assume that there are motion detectors every few yards and other surveillance devices that are so sensitive and secretive that we can only imagine their capabilities.

Assume away.

Not only should we be concerned about the possible danger President Trump faced but we should also be concerned in general about our capacity to monitor our borders and collect useful and time-sensitive data and intelligence from various hot spots around the world where we depend upon electronic as well as human intelligence to keep us safe.

Very much including what is going on in North Korea.

But who knows--the 26-year-old who snuck onto the White House grounds, when captured, said, "I am a friend of the president. I have an appointment."

Maybe he knew Trump was lonely with his wife and son in New York and would be happy to see him. They could watch Hannity together.

The next morning, the president said the "Secret Service did a fantastic job last night."

I also worry about his sense of what he considers to be fantastic.

Jonathan Tuan-Anh Tran

October 1, 2014--60 Minutes With Professor Barack Obama

So he went on TV and told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes that the situation in Syria is fraught with contradictions--"I recognize the contradiction in a contradictory land and a contradictory circumstance."

Yes, he actually said that. Much appreciated Professor Obama.

Among the contradictions, he acknowledged, is the fact that we (really, he and his administration) did not know in advance that ISIS (or ISIL as he obstinately insists on referring to them) was going to turn out to be such a threat to the Middle East and ultimately us.

After 9/11 and the failure to connect the dots that should have warned us about an imminent, cataclysmic threat to the U. S. homeland, one would have thought, with that dark lesson in mind, that something as elaborate as ISIS's emergence and, yes, remarkable barbaric capabilities, would have shown up on someone's Oval Office radar.

Al Qaeda was a relatively small band of terrorists incubating in an under-scrutinized part of the world (the forbidding mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border) compared to the thousands of ISIS jihadist warriors arming and preparing themselves to operate even captured American tanks in plain sight right in the middle of the civil war in Syria.

All one needed to do was go to the Internet to learn directly from ISIS itself what they were about and were intending to do. Undoubtedly and appropriately humiliated, Obama told Kroft that we (he) blew it and so now we're involved in another war in the Middle East that we can't win that will soon cost billions and the lives of more of America's finest young people.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, literally closer to home, there was that embarrassing and dangerous event at the White House. An armed intruder jumped the inadequate and unguarded fence, ran across the lawn, entered the ground floor through the unlocked North Portico, raced left to the East Room, and then, still alluding the Secret Service, entered the Green Room where he was finally tackled.

It would not be my favorite thing to have seen him shot well short of the mansion, but allowing him to make it into the building, where, if he knew the layout better, he could have raced up the stairs to the living quarters, I'd opt for the security forces taking him down.

The Secret Service is far from what it used to be--which might serve as a metaphor for much of our federal government and, alas, much of America--but this latest incident is so pathetic as to render one almost speechless.

We learned in the process that, with Obama family members in residence, in 2011 a sniper hit seven windows in the living quarters, firing armor-piecrcing bullets from hundreds of yards away and that that information was withheld from the public and the Obamas, including the distressing fact that it took White House security forces four days after the attack to even know it occurred!

Under questioning by members of Congress yesterday, Julia Pierson, director of the Secret Service, took responsibility and promised that it won't happen again.

Well it already did happen again, and on her watch. There was the shooting incident in 2011 and then the intrusion 12 days ago. I call that happening again.

And another thing that will happen again is that she will not be fired just as no one was fired for the Veterans Administration or IRS scandals or for that matter the Obamacare website rollout fiasco.

As our professor president said, ours is a contradictory land and what we are seeing are contradictory circumstances.