Congress Suggests Moat, Electronic Fence To Protect White House

PolygamousRanchKid writes Acting Secret Service director Joseph Clancy on Wednesday faced a number of tough questions from the House Judiciary Committee about the fence jumper who made it deep into the White House. But along with the tough questions, Clancy fielded a couple eyebrow raising suggestions on how to better protect the president's home. "Would a moat, water six feet around, be kind of attractive and effective?" Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., asked with trepidation. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, asked: “Would you be in favor of removing the fence around the White House and having, maybe, a virtual or electronic fence around it?” Clancy liked the moat idea better than the electric fence. “My knee-jerk reaction to that would be no, sir,” he told Gohmert. “Partly because of the number of tourists that come up Pennsylvania Avenue and come up to that area.”

Comments

Re:Moat? Electric fence?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're just pointing out the hypocrisy of politicians being protected by guns and fences, while telling citizens they can't have guns and that a fence isn't needed on our nations borders (despite cartels and bad guys with known terrorist ties crossing daily).

Jefferson

[bill_mcgonigle]

Jefferson used to complain about the long line of people at the White House who were there to see him - most of them looking for a job hand-out, but some with legitimate issues for him to deal with.

Perhaps Congress could start by dissolving the enivronment that has caused so many people to want to do antisocial things like harming a President, who is mostly supposed to be a CEO of the government, and occasionally lead a defensive war against the country.

Oh, nm, that's just crazy-talk. Might as well fill the moat with hunter-killer boats from Lockheed.

redundancy

[Tom]

In tech, we solve single-point-of-failure issues with redundancy.

You guys should have not one, but several reserve presidents, and a few reserve headquarters, and if one of them gets blown up, just don't make it a big deal.

That sounds like sarcasm, but really, it's not. Just framed a bit tongue-in-cheek. But how often do you hear members of the senate being targets of assassination attempts? The senate is as important as the president, but thanks to using a highly distributed system with extreme redundancy, they are far less interesting targets.

But I guess we as human beings still have minds from 50,000 years ago and we want to see a leader to our tribe. The concept of shared leadership is brilliant, but too advanced for our stone-age brains.