How do you keep Presidents from being killed WITHOUT an intense wall of security around them?
Is that the most important thing, the protection of the president? Or, are his policies more important?
It seems to me we have two paths to choose; one, the fear based, wall and security at all and ANY cost or, two, how we conduct ourselves with other nations.
One, the president is no longer a servant of the people, no longer one of us. He, or she, is a monarch, an indispensable person. Two, they are JUST the president, just a senator, just a House member. ONE of us.
One, we can do whatever we want, any level of intrigue or double dealing or what have you, to anyone and, while everyone else has to pay the price, at least our monarch is safe. Two, we look well past the price of a barrel of oil and any other political expediency and focus on how to get along with other nations because our president is very much going to have to deal with the consequences of our geopolitics along with everyone else.
Point being, there is, of course, an impact to ones approach, to ones decisions if you KNOW you are the most protected person on the planet vs. merely having personal protection so you can move about unhindered by pan handlers, the media and the odd psycho.
This all boils down to who we are and what we want to be as a people. As per the Franklin quote, we may well have incredible safety but, at what cost? Franklin says the cost is liberty. I say it is also policy which gets back to liberty be it economics, geo politics, or, of course, war.
I mean, would bin Laden have still continued his attacks on the US if we said "Hey, you can harm American's, even our president if you really want to because a free people will ALWAYS and by definition be vulnerable in an open society but, guess what pal, we WILL wipe you and your team off the face of the globe if you do."
Consider. If Saudi Arabia, home of most of the people that attacked us on 9/11, as well as bin Laden, knew we would, rightly, blame them and take it out on them for their radical problem, wouldn't they have long ago shut someone like that down, long before they were a real threat to us? Simple self interest. As it is, they, the place where our most hard core enemies have come from and still come from, have benefited most from 9/11.
If you think about it, our war on terror is nothing but a symptomatic war. We can only attack symptoms, guaranteeing the core problem, the disease, if you will, will always be there because we are not doing, and can not, do anything about it at that level. Only the Saudi's can. Only Iran can.
I'm probably not communicating this very well but, there is something, perhaps much, perhaps all, as Franklin argues, lost with this security at all costs approach. Would it be that bad were Bush or Obama killed by Islamic fundamentalists? For them sure, but, for us, as a people, we would then stop pussy footing around and fix the problem once and for all and move on in peace. Or, those fundamentalists nations and leaders would fix the problem before it ever affected us. A president, plainly stated, in our system is dispensable. So is a Senator or Representative. Freedom and liberty are not supposed to be.
