The Secret Service's Sacred Mission — SACRED!

Here's is the opening paragraph of Carol D. Leonnig's October 1 Washington Post report on Julia Pierson's resignation as head of the Secret Service:

The resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson and the launch of a top-to-bottom review of the agency Wednesday are an acknowledgment by President Obama of what he has long denied: that the force charged with protecting him is in deep turmoil and struggling to fulfill its sacred mission.

Let's highlight that last part:

the force charged with protecting him is struggling to fulfill its sacred mission

It's sacred mission.

Who does Carol Leonnig think the President of the United States is? The Second Coming of the Messiah? Is the year 2014? Is this the United States? Did Carol Leonnig study at least a little history at some level past grade school? . . . Perhaps she studied at Harvard or Yale. With Harvey Mansfield or Gordon Wood. That might explain things. Study with one of the idolaters of America's Golden Cows.

But how did any editor at the Post let that by? Even some dimwitted, groveling money-grubbing lowlife wealth supremacist like Katharine Weymouth....

Feudalism with a Constitution
This is an expression Rutgers professor Joseph Blasi introduced. The idea is one heard more and more widely — that wealth and power is increasingly so great and so concentrated in the hands of so few that it really doesn't matter how robust are the formal guarantees of the Constitution. The law is rendered substantively meaningless given the informal power of the 0.001 percent, the three to five thousand people who really control this country. The people who could commit almost any crime and know that they would not even be investigated (as the Wall Street banksters were not even investigated, as the Bush administration war criminals were not even investigated).

If one does something genuinely insane (kill someone and stick a head on a pike in the front yard) then the odds are high that they will be prosecuted. But as the case of Michael Skakel and Martha Moxley demonstrates, even that is not certain.

Religion Must Step in Where Science Fails
When science and reason are unable to justify absurd nonsense — like the billions spent to protect one war criminal, like Barack Obama — then we must come up with a myth to provide justifcation. Hence the job of the Secret Service becomes a "sacred mission." And the presidency becomes an office with divine status. An imperial presidency is no longer just a executive branch in a superpower with imperial ambitions. It is actually the office of a nascent monarch.