Obama's Flawed Guardians
But neither sarcasm nor an absence of evidence can spoil an attractive conspiracy theory. Suspicions of a plot against Obama are "widespread in black circles," Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, a black Democrat like Cummings, told the New York Times.
Donald W. Tucker, one of the first black members of the Secret Service, who retired from the agency in 1990 and wrote a book about his experiences, told the Times that he also has regularly heard such worries. Yet he also said he felt there was no good reason to think the agency had not protected Obama vigorously.
I agree. Sheer coincidence and incompetence do happen, even in supposedly elite agencies.
Unfortunately, there's always some germ of truth -- or something that sounds like it -- at the core of conspiracy theories. The rumor of a Secret Service plot or negligence toward Obama, for example, is fed by such actual conspiracies as the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's secret efforts to topple Martin Luther King Jr., among other black freedom movement leaders.
But as the great paranoid-literature novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote in "Gravity's Rainbow," "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." I think the right question to ask in the Secret Service snafus is why so many of their details were kept secret, even from the president, until the agency couldn't sit on them any longer.
Sure, they're supposed to be a "secret" service, but not from the president they're assigned to protect.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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