Eliminate Those Inadequate
According to the New York Times article, “Armed Intruder at White House Got to East Room”, by Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt, the incompetence of the Secret Service has recently caused many breaches of security at the White House. If Omar Gonzalez had scaled the White House fence and made it into the First Family’s living quarters on the ABC hit TV show Scandal, we would have balked and called the plot line too far-fetched. But last week, a similar event happened in real life. You may be surprised to hear this, but it is just one of many security blunders that have taken place over the past several years.
One might assume that the White House is one of the safest places in the United States, if not the entire world. However, according to the article by Shear and Schmidt, there have been a series of security embarrassments over the past several years. First, there was a breach that occurred when a couple crashed a state dinner in 2009. Then, in 2011 bullets struck the White House. In 2012 and 2013, there were scandals involving drinking and prostitution on trips overseas. To top it all off, there has been 16 separate cases of people scaling the White House fence in the last five years.
White House security personnel should be held to the same, if not higher standard than any citizen. If I was fired from Starbucks for failing to lock up, shouldn’t Secret Service employees deserve the same punishment for being incompetent? White House security should be top-notch.
Breaches of White House security, specifically those of the Secret Service, are unacceptable. Whether it is an insufficient process or inadequate people, Congress needs to step in to punish those responsible for such security violations. There have been several chances given after mistakes have been made, all risking the life of the President, his family, and the White House. If fewer chances or other forms of punishment were given, maybe these breaches would not occur as often. In regards to the latest incident, I share the sentiments of Representative Elijah Cummings who expressed, “I hate to even imagine what could have happened if Gonzalez had been carrying a gun instead of a knife when he burst inside the White House.” The possibility is extremely unsettling.
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Newspaperlessness 
P1. This is a vastly improved first paragraph, mica, but if Fails For Grammar (FFG) in two places. Find them, fix them, and report to me when you can show me their bloody pelts. You cannot pass the course while violating the Basic Grammar Rules.
P2. There isn’t a specific FFG rule prohibiting the use of “one” as an indefinite pronoun, but I’ll consider adding a 14th rule if you continue to use it. 🙂 Find another way.
See my recent post, the meme that features the “most interesting man in the world,” to fix the punctuation error in your second sentence.
I love the list of security breaches as evidence, mica, but you need to follow your own rules. The scandals that occurred on overseas trips, for example, did not threaten the security of the White House. Right? You might also want to consider devoting individual sentences to these examples. Running them together deprives them of their individual power, not to mention overextending the reach of your punctuation and syntactical skills.
P3. This VASTLY improved paragraph borrows heavily from your classmate bloo’s version of your original verbose version. I admire you for accepting a colleague’s recommendation, but your version fails twice for punctuation, and it also fails in the same way bloo’s fails to be persuasive. Keep an eye on the conversation bloo and I are having and borrow anything you think is useful, but be careful. Just because it appears on a blog doesn’t mean it’s valuable.
P4. You wield considerable rhetorical power, mica. Listening to your voice, I want to agree. Now let’s harness that valuable power to make compelling arguments.
—You say: “Breaches . . . is unacceptable.” I hope you see what’s wrong with that.
—You say something like: “Congress needs to fire people, whether it’s bad process or bad people.” Read carefully and you’ll see the problem.
—Clearly, there are second chances, and fifth chances, if we accept the validity of the security breaches you listed for us earlier. Your claim is rhetorical: “There are no second chances.” Make it factual instead. We can’t bring back a dead president.
—Your quote FFG.
—Your conclusion is weak.
Do I sound negative? I’m actually encouraged. You’ve eliminated what I recall as an overly chatty style and replaced it with a more focused, deliberate, reasonable approach. Good work. Step one. Let’s move on to step two.
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