President Obama is in Ireland and thus so also is the presidential superlimo. The heavily-armored vehicle is an unholy hybrid of a Cadillac, a medium truck, and a small tank. According to the gearheads on Wikipedia, the vehicle is
fitted with military grade armor at least five inches thick, and the wheels are fitted with run flat tires … The doors weigh as much as a Boeing 757 airplane cabin door. The engine is equipped with a Eaton Twin Vortices Series 1900 supercharger system. The vehicle’s fuel tank is leak-proof and is invulnerable to explosions. The car is perfectly sealed against biochemical attacks and has its own oxygen supply and firefighting system built into the trunk. … two holes hidden inside the lower part of the vehicle’s front bumper … are able to emit tear gas The vehicle can also fire a salvo of multi-spectrum infrared smoke grenades as a countermeasure to an Rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) or Anti-tank missile (ATGM) attack and to act as a visual obscurant to operator guided missiles. … The limo is equipped with a driver’s enhanced video system which allows the driver to operate in an infrared smoke environment. This driver’s enhanced video system also contains bumper mounted night vision cameras for operation in pitch black conditions. Kept in the trunk is a blood bank of the President’s blood type.[citation needed] Interestingly, there is no key hole in the doors. A special trick, known only to Secret Service agents, is required to gain access to the passenger area. Furthermore, the entire limo can be locked like a bank vault.
Pretty impressive. However, in their efforts to anticipate every threat, the designers of this thing nevertheless failed to account for the unique engineering characteristics of Irish roads. Foreigners may not be aware that, historically, Ireland’s roads (in conjunction with the system of road signs) have been both its primary transportation network and main form of defense against invasion. During World War II (or “The Emergency” as it was politely referred to in Ireland) the contingency plan against Nazi attack was simply to uproot the road signs and otherwise leave things just as they were, thereby transforming a national transport network into a dangerous labyrinth of treacherous, crater-ridden byways. And so, in an echo of this grim period and forty years of EU Structural Funds notwithstanding, this morning the superlimo got stuck on a hump outside the U.S. embassy.
In fairness to Dublin Corporation and its employees, the Irish road system may not really be to blame here. (Though it’s hard to resist the idea.) Instead, I can attest—as someone who has queued up many times over the years outside the U.S. embassy in the course of getting a various visas approved or renewed—that the ultimate culprit is probably the State Department itself, by way of the variety of security measures it put into place around the embassy during the 1980s. Between them, the system of gates and security bollards, together with the state of the footpath on the Elgin Road, conspired to leave the superlimo high and dry. There’s a metaphor here somewhere.
Update: Via Facebook and elsewhere comes the argument that, because Embassies are sovereign territory, the road was in fact American. On the other hand, of course, the purpose of Obama’s visit was to reaffirm his roots in the town of Moneygall. So Irish reaction has moved quite smoothly from “American President’s Limo Gets Stuck On Irish Road” to “Returning Irishman’s Car Damaged By American Road”.
{ 26 comments }
Martin Bento 05.23.11 at 6:20 pm
Let’s not have semantic drift slurp us right down the memory hole. Maybe this didn’t cross the threshold of attention in Ireland, but “Humpgate” in American political discourse refers to the unaccountable lump found on Bush’s back during one of his Kerry debates. The bizarreness of the Bush admin threatens to fade with time, and it shouldn’t, if only to inform our notion of what sort of things happen “in real life”.
thereisnorule6 05.23.11 at 6:42 pm
the Dalek of limos.
Keith 05.23.11 at 7:10 pm
The limo may seem a little excessive but keep in mind, Obama has received more death threats than any other president in a hundred years. And these aren’t just the veiled threats from Republican politicians — we have crazy people who like to show up at rallies with automatic weapons. You know, to make our president feel welcome.
Though if they get stuck, they should call up the tour bus driver we had when we were over there in ’08. He had an Obama sticker on the back of his bus and pronounced his name like it was O’bama and he was from down the way in Killarney. He was better informed on American politics than half the people on the bus and I’m sure would have an earful for the president on how to fix just about anything.
Greg 05.23.11 at 7:39 pm
Here’s the vid (nice bit of crunch at 0:16 btw): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mKym-Zi3mOQ (h/t: autoblog)
Greg 05.23.11 at 7:40 pm
@Keith – the limos roll out whenever/wherever the President goes, it’s not specifically related to Obama (here’s a great article from The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/inside-the-secret-service/8390/).
chris 05.23.11 at 8:52 pm
For my money, the funny thing is not that the limo is massively over-engineered to withstand anything short of a cruise missile, but that it’s massively over-engineered to withstand anything short of a cruise missile *or a bumpy road*. In designing for every conceivable black, magenta, or plaid swan, the engineers lost sight of the white ones.
Henry (not the famous one) 05.23.11 at 9:31 pm
You have “Dr. Who,” we have “Robocop.” See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNckavq9fiY; the relevant footage starts at 1:40.
By the way, the Soviets supposedly had a similar defense strategy during World War II: they inserted deliberate errors into all the available maps so that if any fell into the hands of the Wehrmacht they would find themselves on the road to Pinsk when they wanted to go to Minsk. Funny thing, of course, is that they continued the deception for the next several decades, through the Brezhnev era. Or so the story goes.
EWI 05.23.11 at 9:32 pm
i) “Dublin Corporation” hasn’t existed for nearly a decade now. It’s “Dublin City Council”.
ii) This wasn’t the limo carrying Obama – that would be the twin which was coming behind this (decoy?) one, both of which were racing around Dublin today.
EWI 05.23.11 at 9:34 pm
@ Henry. I always wondered why the Irish national aversion to signposting roads. Now I know – a Baldrick-like cunning defence plan! This explains why we haven’t ever seen fit to bother with the expense of a fully-outfitted Defence Forces.
c.l. ball 05.23.11 at 9:51 pm
Legally an embassy is not the sovereign territory of the ambassador’s nation. The host nation agrees to immunize the embassy from its authority.
Nick Barnes 05.23.11 at 10:24 pm
For my sins I was leafing through the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. The lie that broke the camel’s back was that this car weighs 250,000 lbs.
Kieran Healy 05.23.11 at 11:10 pm
EWI: Once the corpo, always the corpo.
Caroline 05.24.11 at 3:50 am
The meme comes full circle! Just in case anyone has forgotten this delicious earworm:
ajay 05.24.11 at 9:17 am
During World War II (or “The Emergency†as it was politely referred to in Ireland) the contingency plan against Nazi attack was simply to uproot the road signs and otherwise leave things just as they were, thereby transforming a national transport network into a dangerous labyrinth of treacherous, crater-ridden byways.
I am surprised by this – having spent many happy but confused hours trying to get anywhere on Irish roads, I had assumed that the road signs themselves were an essential part of the contingency plan.
Though if they get stuck, they should call up the tour bus driver we had when we were over there in ‘08. He had an Obama sticker on the back of his bus and pronounced his name like it was O’bama and he was from down the way in Killarney.
“I had that Michael Lewis in the back of my bus once”.
dave 05.24.11 at 10:29 am
Re Dublin Corporation: the privatized utility companies of Britain, which all have names ending in Ltd. or plc, still regularly get customers calling up with “Is that the Water Board?”
If anything, the tendency is higher in Thatcher-voting demographics.
Alex 05.24.11 at 11:36 am
Better yet, hordes of people still talk about the “Gas Board” although town gas boards haven’t existed since 1967 when (nationalised) British Gas was created. This now includes several generations of people who have been born since ’67 and even some who have joined us since privatisation in 1987.
Perhaps we will stop talking about the Gas Board when neither gas or boards of directors are used any more, or perhaps not.
Henri Vieuxtemps 05.24.11 at 11:42 am
Hydraulics, man. What they need is hydraulics.
Barry 05.24.11 at 12:14 pm
Nick Barnes 05.23.11 at 10:24 pm
” For my sins I was leafing through the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. The lie that broke the camel’s back was that this car weighs 250,000 lbs.”
An M-1 tank is supposed to weigh in at 70 tons, meaning 140,000 lbs, and is supposed to incorporate depleted uranium armor. I don’t see how they could get that limo up to even M-1 tank weight.
Jameson Burt 05.24.11 at 3:23 pm
All Stretch Limos Hang on humps.
Fairfax County, outside D.C., has attributes similar to Ireland:
at a 4-way intersection all 4 roads can have different names, and
roads at intersections can get the same name even though they make 90 degree turns.
The best similarity of Fairfax to Ireland roads I saw 2 days ago,
when a black stretch limo scraped bottom as it came out of a hotel
and over a hump before entering Highway 236 (Little River Turnpike).
Recalling geometry, draw a straight line representing the limo’s bottom
with the line’s middle on a street hump.
That line’s endpoints get very high.
So, a stretch limo needs a Wile E. Coyote upward expander above each axle.
Myles 05.24.11 at 4:02 pm
Hydraulics, man. What they need is hydraulics.
Is that a vehicular interpretative dance?
Perhaps we will stop talking about the Gas Board when neither gas or boards of directors are used any more, or perhaps not.
Cue the Canadian tendency to call the utility companies “hydro” for no apparent modern reason.
Ginger Yellow 05.24.11 at 7:46 pm
Clearly the president should drive around in a pencil.
Tomboktu 05.24.11 at 7:54 pm
@Jameson Burt in comment #19
“roads at intersections can get the same name even though they make 90 degree turns.”
Even better is Mount Street in Dublin. The two pieces of it are parallel to each other.
chris 05.24.11 at 9:03 pm
roads at intersections can get the same name even though they make 90 degree turns.
I’ve seen at least one of these in the US that resulted from adding a new road to a place where the previous road had *already* made a 90 degree turn, thus creating a new T-intersection. Simply not renaming either piece of the previous road created the result described.
What I haven’t seen yet is a situation where a road curves around and crosses itself at a 90-degree angle, creating a 4-way intersection where all four directions have the *same* road name.
sg 05.24.11 at 10:59 pm
Barry at 18, it’s not depleted uranium that makes the president’s limo so heavy – it’s carrying a very small singularity, that was formed when the birther movement encountered his long form birth certificate. The threat to human civilization is not an attack on the nobel “peace” prize winning president, but the disastrous gravitational consequences of allowing the singularity to escape from its containment.
Earwig 05.25.11 at 10:00 pm
“keep in mind, Obama has received more death threats than any other president in a hundred years”
That needs a cite or it’s just wishful baloney — “oh, how they hate on our poor Obama.”.
We have heard from Mark Sullivan, a director of the Secret Service, as reported in 2009 in the WaPo:
Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) wanted to know whether Obama faced a greater threat to his security than past presidents.
Sullivan said that published reports claiming that Obama faced a 400 percent increase in death threats were incorrect. “I’m not sure where that number comes from,” he said. The number of threats against Obama, he said, “are the same level as it has been for the last two presidents.”
So, keep in mind?
William Sjostrom 05.30.11 at 1:37 pm
Once while riding the bus in Cork, the radio was on as usual, and it was on some talk show. A caller complained about a particularly egregious pothole, and the host explained to her that it was not a pothole, it was a bus garage. It took several minutes before the laughter on the bus finally ended.
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