It’s beginning to look as if I was far too quick to give thanks that “the Secret Service is, apparently, not as corrupt as the FBI.”

We’re now learning, among other things, that Trump’s Secret Service detail was made up of second- and third-stringers, with more experienced agents having been pulled away to protect “Dr.” Jill Biden, and that even the Secret Service director is a “DEI” (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”) hire, put in place under a doctrine that amounts to “Affirmative Action on steroids,” replacing meritocracy with “qualifications” based on identity politics.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, interviewed amid calls for her resignation, appears to be in full “CYA” mode in justifying her agency's failures. Her remarks suggest that she prioritized her agents’ safety to a ridiculous degree over the life of Donald Trump. Her claim is reminiscent of stories about police standing by out of concern for their own “health and safety” as people drown before them in shallow water. (Here’s just one such story.) This may be a distressing trend in modern policing.

Lots of information is now surfacing that points to negligence on the part of the Secret Service. But one must wonder if the people involved were negligent in allowing the attempt to occur or if there’s a much bigger, more insidious “Deep State” picture here, and their actual negligence was in the failure to ensure that the sniper’s mission was successfully completed.

Any number of aspects of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, as it’s being reported and “explained,” are beginning to stink. They stink at least as much as Joe Biden’s disingenuous lament (in which he still managed to include his favorite anti-Trump references, like the Jan. 6 “insurrection”).

Image: Secret Service agents at work (cropped). YouTube screen grab.

Let me zero in on (and attempt to deconstruct) just one of them.

We are being told that a local Butler, PA, police officer confronted the sniper on the roof “just seconds before” the sniper opened fire on President Trump. We are being told that the sniper pointed his rifle at the officer, who “retreated and fell,” whereupon the sniper aimed his rifle back at the podium and began firing.

There used to be a joke about the difference in the way an LAPD cop confronts a suspicious person vs. the way an NYPD cop does. The LAPD cop draws his gun, assumes the Weaver stance, and says, “Freeze, Turkey!” The NYPD cop ambles over, with his hand resting on the butt of his holstered weapon, and conversationally inquires, “Hey, Numbnuts! Whadda youse t’ink yer doin’?”

Need I point out that the LAPD method makes far more sense when the suspicious person is a guy with a rifle on a roof overlooking a political rally? The very second that the rifleman began to swing his barrel in the officer’s direction, the officer would have been absolutely justified in firing his weapon, which should have already been in his hand.

In his tales about the NYPD Stakeout Unit, the late Jim Cirillo (a man who survived more gunfights than Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Wild Bill Hickok combined!) told how he and his team would always call out (from their place of concealment in, say, a liquor store being robbed at gunpoint) a command such as “Police!”, “Don’t Move!” or “Drop the gun!”

The robber was not really expected to comply (although those who did were arrested without being shot). The purpose of the command was to make the robber instinctively swing around with his gun pointed at the officers, whereupon the very last thing the criminal saw might be the muzzle flash of a stakeout squad shotgun.

And this is how the confrontation atop that Butler, PA building should have gone. Except that it didn’t.

One must wonder what actually transpired on that rooftop. Perhaps the young rifleman looked the rural township flatfoot in the eye and declared, “I’m not the sniper you’re looking for,” the way Alec Guinness, as Obi-Wan Kenobe, foiled the Stormtroopers in Star Wars, causing the local yokel to say, like the late Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, “Never mind!”

(By the way, at the beginning of that Star Wars clip, Obi-Wan utters another line, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” He might as well have been speaking of the Obama/Biden regime or the unholy alliance of the Democrat Party and the so-called Journalism Establishment!)

Instead, we’re being asked to believe that the gunman pointed his rifle at the cop, causing the local LEO to “retreat and fall” (or “flee and jump”), whereupon (in an even greater stretch of credulity, we are asked to believe that) the self-appointed (?) hitman re-acquired his original target within mere seconds and commenced firing, with time to get off multiple rounds before being “neutralized” by Secret Service snipers, who should have had him in their sights and should have neutralized him, long before he ever squeezed the trigger.

The UK’s Daily Mail provides more (and different) details about just how long the authorities were aware of the gunman on the roof and about the rooftop confrontation with the local LEO. Meanwhile, a report tells how the Fraternal Order of Police is bristling over the Secret Service apparently blaming local police for the agency’s own shortcomings.

We’re being told that, even once the Secret Service snipers saw the gunman on the roof, they had to determine if he was a threat before deciding to open fire. What a crock! Unless, of course, they had been instructed to allow him to complete his nefarious deed before eliminating him.

But that would be a wild-eyed, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, wouldn’t it? Sheesh. That’d be like believing that Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald both worked for the CIA!

The only part of this story that doesn’t stink is the comment from a witness who, asked by a reporter what happened to the gunman on the roof, matter-of-factly replied, “Oh, they [government snipers] blew his head off.”

I’m sorry, but I couldn’t suppress a smile over that one.

Author’s Note: Stu Tarlowe was, for more than a decade, the personal editor for the late talk radio icon, author and columnist Barry Farber; he was also, prior to contracting COVID, a well-paid staff writer for a think tank and magazine dealing in societal and financial trends. Since 2010 he’s contributed over 160 pieces to American Thinker, and for the past several years he has also put out a Substack newsletter, Stu’s Stack o’ Stuff (which is by no means exclusively political). Both of these endeavors pay him not a single penny, but he would be pleased to write similar material for money.