Turns out that Jay Severin’s stupidity transcends politics and government. Today he took the position that the Secret Service should have shot the shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist.
Jay concluded from the lack of retaliatory gunfire that the Secret Service is either inept or so sensitive to concerns of “political correctness” that it can no longer protect the president effectively. I called in and got on the air in record time. (Inexplicably, Jay spent almost the entire three o’clock hour taking calls rather than pontificating.) I pointed out that Jay had no training in security details or any form of law enforcement. Jay responded that he had been in the same room as several presidents, which in his mind is qualification enough to pass judgment on the effectiveness of the Secret Service. I pointed out that every person in that room had almost certainly been through one if not two metal detectors and could safely assumed to pose little threat to the president. I asked if Jay really thought an appropriate response would have been to fire into an unarmed crowd. Jay said yes. This is in keeping with Jay’s earlier suggestions that an appropriate response to the death of a single American soldier in the Middle East would be the nuclear annihilation of two large Middle Eastern cities. Fortunately for the best and brightest, at the end of the hour Jay got a call from a gentleman named Paul who identified himself as a former special agent with the Treasury department. Paul commented that if anyone was to blame for the slight risk to the president’s well-being, it was the president himself, given that it was likely at the request of the president that no Secret Service agents appeared on the stage behind the president’s podium. It was this decision, according to Paul, that gave the Secret Service virtually no chance of shielding the president from foreign objects.