Unintended Consqeunces
Claire Wolfe feels presidents should hire their own security guards:
Some will say I don't understand security needs in this dangerous world. On the contrary, I think I understand them pretty well. If the U.S. government were behaving itself at home and abroad, and if individual Americans still saw themselves a sovereign (rather than as dependents of an all-powerful state), we and our public servants would be quite secure, thank you. And Bush could buy a plane ticket and hire his own staff like any other good, all-American rich man.
Unfortunately, the good parts of progress and capitalism -- increased travel, wealth, access to arms -- have made the Jeffersonian or Lincolnesque blase attitude on security untenable. I agree it would be better for our executives to have direct access to the maddening crowds as it would enable the interchange of ideas without spin. Alas, it can't be.
A president taking Claire's course would find himself soon enough besieged by the unstable, the unbalanced. We've even recently seen peacable Sweden lose a beloved foreign minister to a unstable fellow with a knife.
It wouldn't be long at all before the same thing happened to a US President.
