Secret Service Broke After Paying Biden's Rent; Skimps Hooker Budget

The Secret Service paid Vice President Joe Biden over $20,000 in rent last year for the privilege of residing on his property while protecting him.  Apparently one of its agents couldn’t cough up $50 to pay a Cartagenero hooker last week.  Coincidence?

Eleven Secret Service staff members were sent home from tony beach resort city Cartagena and put on administrative leave, ahead of President Obama’s arrival Saturday for the 6^th Summit of the Americas, for the indiscretion of having invited a squadron of prostitutes to their hotel rooms.  One of the hookers brought to the posh Hotel Caribe was upset over a lousy $47 an agent had failed to pay her.  She went to complain to the police, who forwarded her case to the State Department.

Several hotel waiters reported that the week before the scandal, agents had been drinking heavily and carousing at the Caribe.  The prostitution scandal broke the day before Obama was scheduled to arrive in South America, and took place just a few blocks from his hotel.

Ten or more military members serving the Southern Command, at least one from each service branch, were also caught up in the scandal, but were allowed to stay in Cartagena over the weekend due to their needed expertise.  The military staff were confined to their living quarters, ordered not to communicate with anyone, and prohibited from ordering anything stronger than virgin piña coladas.

Ronald Kessler, author of the exposé In the President’s Service, calls Colombiagate “the biggest scandal in Secret Service history.”

He names, among other factors responsible for the Secret Service’s laxity in recent years, its failure to keep abreast of the latest advances in firearms—a deficit I’m sure the rabidly pro-Second Amendment Obama administration is quickly working to correct.

Kessler cites as evidence of the Secret Service’s shoddy standards Tareq and Michaele Salahi’s ability to crash the 2009 White House State Dinner, a security breach that became a national embarrassment and stoked fears of future lapses that might endanger the president and his staff.  He also references the recent intruder who managed to scale the fence surrounding the White House and start crawling across the lawn before the Secret Service captured him.

Obama has inexplicably allowed Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan to hold his post despite these screw-ups.

Kessler argues that the president is particularly unsafe now, because replacement agents who were hurried in to replace the Cartagena 11 haven’t had time to acclimate to their new environment.  Secret Service management’s failure to change its attitude has also set the stage for future indiscretions.

New York Representative Peter King and California Representative Darrell Issa, who have proven their national security credentials via their investigation of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the Fast and Furious gunrunning scheme, respectively, have pledged to look into the scandal.

Meanwhile, the toadying media is proclaiming that Obama still has confidence in the Secret Service—without asking whether he should have confidence, or whether the American people have confidence.  Rather than apologizing and accepting responsibility for the incident, Obama and his cronies have chided the media for their “flashy” coverage of a story they label a “distraction.”

(Obama also noted that he would ‘wait until the full investigation is completed until I pass judgment.’  Had the unpaid Cartageno hooker been black, he would have already claimed that the Secret Service “acted stupidly,” and that “If I had a daughter who was a prostitute, she’d look like María.”)

The Cartagena incident is a perfect example of the broader pattern of the Obama administration’s incompetence, abuse of power, sense of entitlement, waste of taxpayers’ money, tin-eared response to scandal, and indifference toward fulfilling government’s legitimate, limited functions.  (Also Democrats’ lax morals and seedy sexual proclivities.)

These sleazy secret service recipients, most of whom are married, may not have cared that they were cheating on their wives.  But their irresponsible actions exposed them to potential blackmail, which could put the president’s life in danger.

As for the sex angle, I know Obama wasn’t directly involved in the affair, but when’s the last time a Republican presidential administration’s reputation was marred by a major sex scandal?  Say what you will about the vastly overblown Tailhook incident under George H. W. Bush: at least its instigators weren’t putting national security at risk.

The Secret Service horndogs also made the administration’s trade and security goals for the Americas Summit more difficult, given that distracted and titillated attendees—including 33 heads of state—spent the weekend winking and elbowing each other over the behavior of the boobs who were supposed to be protecting the president.  The scandal jeopardized Obama’s ability to stand up against Latin America’s overwhelming pressure to end sanctions against communist Cuba and include her in future summits held by the Organization of American States.  (As for other administration goals, such as convincing Brazil and fellow developing nations of the value of reckless U.S. monetary expansionism, I’m happy to have these efforts hampered.)

Before Obama was inaugurated, liberals used to gasp that a black president would be uniquely susceptible to assassination.  It turns out that the greatest facilitator of such a scenario is the bumbling security outfit our incompetent commander-in-chief has retained to protect him.