We were a little startled by the news, and perhaps you were as well. The tempo of things since …what are we calling it? The messaging varied at first. “Incident” and “Event” were first, though it transitioned to something of general agreement as an “attempted assassination.”
You know how our collective recollections start like that these days. Just last week, we were still defining things by when “the Debate” had occurred. Now of course it is “the shooting.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, you know?
The timing of the “incident” was immediately on the brink of the GOP Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We were going to talk about that this morning, and the prospects for the finalization of the Republican ticket. That is still scheduled 111 days from the breakfast being swept away on the patio at Socotra Publications World Headquarters.
The GOP sealed everything up with startling immediacy yesterday. The assassination attempt may have changed the timing, but by late afternoon the announcement came that Ohio’s Senator J.D. Vance had been selected to run as the junior member of a ticket headed by Former President Trump.
We had expected more discussion about the matter and there were a few other eligible fellows- all male- who had interesting backgrounds, but we were not treated to an extended appreciation of them. It is Senator Vance, still a young man just brushing 40 years of age, venture capitalist, author and Marine veteran.
There was other messaging that accompanies the news about him, and that is the messaging about the Secret Service response to the assassination. The streams come from diametrically opposed sources. The Times (and others) who have served as reliable conduits for Administration messaging reflected support for the response and the leadership of the organization. Those have not traditionally been matters of discussion in the last six or seven shootings of our Chief Executives.
This time it is. We will not attempt to delve into the specifics, but only the essence of them. The Secret Service reports to Secretary Mayorkas, who has expressed “100% support” for the leadership of Kimberly Cheatle as Service Chief since 2022.
With messaging, the news has to be accompanied by source and orientation of the reporting. Legacy media has generally endorsed Secretary Mayorkas’s view, citing Cheatle’s service as head of the Pepsi Cola Corporation’s security apparatus.
Other sources point out some additional information that suggest a more complete account would include the nearly three decades of Secret Service experience Ms. Cheatle had with the agency before departing for Pepsi. That would require more space and experience than is resident on The Patio. We don’t know what criteria was used to select her for initial employment. Was there a requirement for female agents to serve on protective details for high-value women? Was there an institutional bar to their advancement within the organization?
There were some highly-broadcast scandals that had been in progress since well before the campaign for the 2016 election.
In 2012, the federal government had released a 229-page list of allegations against Secret Service agents going back to 2004. They included “involvement with prostitutes, leaking sensitive information, publishing pornography and other misconduct.
The timing of the publicity was an interesting parallel to Director Cheatle’s career and the backdrop of social change. We have no privileged information on the specifics of her initial service, but it was in the immediate change required by the election of Bill Cinton in 1992. He political career was owed in no small part to the efforts of his wife- and political partners- Hillary Clinton. Her public presence and voice required a new approach on the part of the Service to accommodate new challenges to safety.
We have no further information on any of the internal politics of the matter, but were close observers to some of it elsewhere in the government we served at the time. It is fair to say that some components of the government were more active in their efforts to more effectively harness the powers of the government to support just social goals.
That led, over time, to the adoption of the use of private e-mail accounts to conduct official government business as a manifestation of how profound the changes were. We make no accusations of anything improper by anyone, remember? We do know that one of the reasons to not use an official government account for communications would be to avoid U.S. Code requirments for such records be retained.
The ones surrounding the Secret Service controversy are among the official and private records that have vanished.
There are several more aspects of that struggle in progress elsewhere and we will report on the messaging streams that reflect the goals of the parties promulgating them. But suffice it say from the messaging this morning, the issues of equity, gender, orientation and representation are prominent.
They are not ones that come to mind in the more simple mission of protecting individuals from acts of public violence. Like, shouldn’t an agent sworn to “take a bullet” to protect an individual be tall enough to actually be hit in doing so?
Is this a matter of “justice” colliding with “mission accomplishment?”
We don’t know. There will be plenty to talk about in the days to come. What we know from apparent agreed fact is that the shooter was seen and imaged doing a duck-crawl across the roof to his shooting spot. At some point, a local law-enforcement officer confronted the man, who brandished a rifle and caused the Sheriff to retreat. Then, the shooter returned to his firing position and launched a volley at the protected individual, one of them striking within millimeters of a fatal impact.
Initial reports of multiple shooters have not been explained. Association between the young man and a large corporation with other significant representation in the Administration’s inner circle have not been explained. And the appointment of Ms. Cheatle as head of the secret Service was influenced by special advisor Anthony Bernal, who wiki reports as being a “gay Hispanic” with long service to the East Wing.
So, this morning we are left with a completed GOP ticket for the election a little over three months away. We may be watching a government organization in crisis, one whose primary mission has been subsumed in the tumult of social issues deemed more important than the mission for which it was created.
There will be more to come on all this, we are confident. But the messaging is pretty extraordinary. Will Senator Vance shave?
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com