"Good Lord. I do not want any of this to be the case. I'd far rather have the whole thing have been simple incompetence."

Wrote Jamie, in the comments to my post "Biden’s Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump’s Security To Allow An Assassination Attempt."

The post title is a quote from a Sean Davis article in The Federalist. Instapundit pulled out Jamie's quote for his post on the Sean Davis article.

Also quoted at Instapundit is a comment from Achilles: "At first glance every trained person in the world said one thing: Bullshit."

So how are you feeling — more like Jamie or more like Achilles? The Jamie position, if I may rephrase it, is: I hope the Secret Service is as bad as it would need to be for this to have all been mere negligence. The Achilles position is: The negligence theory is beyond belief.

I'm not one for jumping into conspiracy theories, but here, the idea that it happened through multiple levels of Secret Service failures feels more like a conspiracy theory. You have to strain and get creative to explain it. If you begin in the Jamie position and desperately hope there was no intent to allow a killer access, you have to struggle to explain how that could be.

Apologies to Achilles and Jamie if I've misstated their thinking or if they don't like their names being used in this way. I'll rename the "positions" if they object.