Secret Service SNAFU

 

Today Julia Pierson, the Director of the United States Secret Service, offered her resignation, and I accepted it. I salute her 30 years of distinguished service to the Secret Service and the Nation.

Today, I have also asked the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, aided by this Department’s General Counsel, to assume control and direction of the ongoing inquiry by the Secret Service of the fence jumping incident at the White House on September 19. Deputy Secretary Mayorkas should complete that review and submit findings to me by November 1, 2014.

Finally, I have also determined that scrutiny by a distinguished panel of independent experts of the September 19 incident and related issues concerning the Secret Service is warranted. The Panelists will be named shortly. By December 15, 2014, this panel will submit to me its own assessment and recommendations concerning security of the White House compound. I will also invite the panel to submit to me recommendations for potential new directors of the Secret Service, to include recommendations of individuals who come from outside the Secret Service. I will also request that the panel advise me about whether it believes, given the series of recent events, there should be a review of broader issues concerning the Secret Service. The security of the White House compound should be the panel’s primary and immediate priority.

It is worth repeating that the Secret Service is one of the finest official protection services in the world, consisting of men and women who are highly trained and skilled professionals prepared to put their own lives on the line in a second’s notice for the people they protect. Last week, the Secret Service was responsible for the protection of the President as well as 140 visiting heads of state or government as they convened at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Likewise, in August the Secret Service handled the protection of 60 world leaders as they convened in Washington, D.C. for the African Summit. As usual, the Secret Service executed these highly complex and demanding assignments without incident. There is no other protection service in the world that could have done this.

I have no desire to join in the Wingnut chorus or the blame game on the current state of the Secret Servic, still this is the second critical agency under the President’s purview to show a incomprehensible amount of rot. First there was the V.A. It failed after several tries to improve the quality of treatment for our wounded warriors, instead opting to cook the books. Now the Secret Service is shown to have an astounding amount of incompetence, slackness and a totally rotten upper management.

There was an obvious problem with the Secret Service way back in the beginning of Obama’s term with the White House Gate Crashers. Obama was supposed to be furious, but what happened after he, most likely, offered a few choice words that can not be repeated lest the Dignitas of the office be soiled? All the things that are happening now should have happened back then. And if something like this did happen back then, it failed to solve the issues with the Service.

I’m hearing that the decay of the Service took off when it was moved from Treasury to the ever sprawling DHS. Make sense to me, DHS was built to fail because Bush The Dumber did not want DHS in the first place. It doesn’t help that the Service has become a lap dog of the office is supposed to protect. Fundamental rules of security are being breached to smooth political operatives and staffers in the White House. When doors that should remain locked are left unlocked to make life easier for the WH staff that is a huge problem. “Sorry dude, dudette you got to go around, this door remains secure.” “Who are you, and what are you doing in this elevator? Get out.” “No, Mr. McDonough, we can not do that, will not do that, it’s too risky, it violates too many protocols, policies and procedures.”

And some of this is on the president or at least his staff. When those agents got in trouble in Columbia over a hooker bill, I repeat over a hooker bill, a big flashing light along with a loud klaxon should have been going off in the Office Of The White House. Congress should have been all over that mess demanding reform. The agents in question got tossed under the bus, but nothing like the overview that is happening now. No, a guy had to jump the White House fence.

Hello, the White House Fence does not do it’s primary job of keeping people the hell off the grounds?  Then the guy blasts through the grounds with no real issue and not one K-9 being released because, um, somebody might get hurt? So there is no real training followed or procedure to make sure the dog does not get confused in the scrum and become the toothy equivalent of friendly fire — fantastic. What do we have next? With a good head of steam built up our man bulls through a female agent. Let that sink in, an agent, as in one agent. A whole section of the White House has just one agent on duty with no back up to speak of. We know she had no back-up because the bad guy was able to “overpower” her. Once she was out of the picture our man got to do a little more dashing about before he gets nabbed by, wait for it, wait for it, an agent who had already clocked out for the day. Now tell me that the security at the White House is not seven shades of ugly.

Now if the White House detail suffers from chronic under staffing, low moral, laughable, out of date technology, and senior management that can not figure out that joint is being shot at, what is the rest of the department like? Oh, it’s officers are regularly getting sloppy, totally smashed, drunk; that’s nice. And when they are getting drunk in some places they are causing international incidents because they tried to fleece their rented bed mates. This is an institution gone soft as butter left out in the August sun. This is a part of government that has rotted through and through. And I can guess why.

The Service has gotten complacent, it’s in a very dangerous place because there is no institutional memory of the last successful penetration of its protective shield. That would be Ronald Regan. Regan literally took a bullet for that lapse, as did James Brady, a D.C. police man and a Secret Service agent. Turned out that the Secret Service screwed the pooch then too, most likely because previous incident was back in the time of Gerald Ford and the institutional memory of that event was a getting a little hazy. And in a continuing theme, just like the Security Service of the State Department, there are issues of under-staffing and underfunding of the agency. This is a one two punch to effectiveness of the Agency, loss of institutional memory causing a degradation of standards, plus lack of resources causing a further degradation.

As for a suggested fixes, I haven’t heard a coherent response from the TEA Party / Republican Bobbsey Twins , other than “If Obama gets whacked, it’s his own dang fault.” Well, that’s good to know, any solutions to offer? Privatize? Thanks for the stock answer and the attendant boilerplate, here are some nice parting gifts. Democrats? Hello? Please come out of your Fetal position, pull that thumb out of you mouth, and respond. I guess not. Mr. President, what do you have? A panel; any sense of urgency here Hamlet? Some guy with a knife just had an excellent misadventure in your home. Oh, you offered up the Director of the Secret Service as sacrifice to the angry Political Gods of the Potomac via the Worthy, Ancient Mysteries, and Ceremonies of the Bus Toss. Now that the most Holy, Sacred, and Magnanimous Bus has been appeased by bathing its wheels in the political blood of this most decorous and satisfying offering, what else do you have Mr President? Nothing,  just a game of administrative musical chairs and some fist banging and a bit of rah-rah for the lower orders for now, maybe more later? Lovely.

If the Federal Government can not protect its Chief Executive, and Head Of State there is a problem with more than just the Agency that has the job. This is a systemic failure. Neither the Congress nor the Executive is doing its job. Congress is not doing oversight, not being proactive and not even being reactive in a way that ensures follow through. The Executive is not doing its job, especially the White House Staff, it should not be asking for waivers of security procedures just for convenience sake. On the flip side the Agency has to have the spine to say no, to enforce policy and procedures. And this is not the first time we have seen this kind of process go down. Congress is failing because it is in the control of people who despise the whole idea of governance and of governing. The executive does seem rudderless, and Obama aloof, unwilling to get into the gears and get his hands dirty. He also seems to have a really bad feel for personalities. He keeps choosing Senior Management people who face pant spectacularly, Kathleen Sebelius, Eric Shinseki, Janet Napolitano come to mind. I also wonder where the Press was in all of this. The gate crashers and hooker incident were in the same time space, why did the press not dig a little deeper? Why are we only finding out now about the four day delay to investigate the shooting incident, and that it was the cleaning staff who found the evidence? We are getting one hell of a pile on now, but why did it take so long?

The rot goes a lot deeper than just the Secret Service and no one seems to want to get the damn termites under control. We keep having these chunks of our government fall upon our heads but pay no mind. Voter participation in off year elections is distressingly low. Pay to Play is the standard operating procedure, and in many states outright voter suppression is the order of the day. We just let the corruption go on a pace, letting knaves and outright crooks do the work of governance. But hey, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi, am I right?

The Adams Conundrum

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

I’ve been thinking of that quote for a while now, gentle reader. It does a fairly good job of distilling the central problem with the office of the President of the United States ever since Saint Ronny of Ray-Gun cleaned the old peanut farmer’s clock in 1980. It is hard to take a political process seriously when a grade B movie star, and professional political crank, manages to grab the brass ring.

But it has been even more depressing this election cycle because of the clown car primary process the Republicans have inflicted on a weary republic. I watch these proceedings with an ever rising sense of panic and melancholy. Is this really the best we can do as a nation? Is this really the top tier of political professionals? I would not trust this lot of politicians to run a McDonald’s, never mind the Hyper-power that is the USA.

Granted, it has been darkly humorous to watch the Conservative base swoon over one white knight after another; only to have them self-immolate before even doing battle with the hated dragon of Multiple Choice Mitt Romney. From Bachmann, to Perry, to Cain, to Gingrich, and now to Mr. Man-on-Dog-Sex Santorum, it has been an exercise in flail and fail. Each of these prospect proved beyond a shadow of doubt that they “should on no account be allowed to do the job.”  You would do better with a trained monkey.

Not that the Donkey Party is doing much better. They have their own issues to deal with, most under the heading of Barack Hussein Obama. The rank ambition of the man, linked with absolutely no moral compass, has been disastrous for the Democratic Party.  Obama’s “lets make a deal” transactional style of “leadership” has perverted everything the Party of FDR stood for.

The J’ accuse against the Obama lead, and feckless, Democratic Party is long and depressing. The “Progressive” wing of that party has been especially inept. Faced with a President who is essentially doing Richard Nixon in black-face, the Democrats in Congress have caved on every center-right talking point their leader has ever uttered. Spineless leaders, Pelosi in the House, Reid in the Senate, have followed the President in a Bataan Death March further and further to the right. Like their President they have followed the corporate money, and kowtowed to the wishes of the New Robber Barons. The special interests of big pharma, big business, and the Insurance Industry were coddled. The masses were toss the odd stale crumb to feast on, but only after reproductive health rights were trampled on by the usual gang of sex-phobes and religious reactionaries.

That even a stalwart leftist and self-proclaimed “Socialist” like Bernie Sanders begged off a legitimate challenge to Obama’s rightward lurch tells you everything you need to know about the Democratic Party. The Republicans are right; the Donkeys are, “surrender monkeys.” The Democrats keep folding to the power of the Corporations, to Wall Street, to the rich and connected, to their donors. They cannot even be bothered to go through the motions of fighting Corporate power.

Thus Obama gets to rest up and keep his powder dry, waiting for Mitt the inevitable to emerge from the toxic swamps of the Republican Primary process. Is anyone else having a severe case of acid reflux over this result? Is anyone else utterly disheartened that the final results of this process, which looks like two political hacks with no core beliefs fighting an epically dirty campaign from May to November? I know I don’t want to watch this unravel. I would rather dig my eyes out with rusty spoons.

Yet that is what we as a nation are up against. It is the end result of an utterly corrupt system melting down into absurdity.  Team Obama is shooting for a one billion dollar war chest. Romney will likely meet or exceed that amount. It is an open auction for the Unitary Executive, and you are not invited. In this bidding war, ordinary citizens do not have a prayer of having any influence.

And what of the contenders? What type of person is willing to whore themselves out for a billion dollar price tag? What type of person is willing to dial for dollars, to beg and wheedle for filthy lucre? What kind of promises, subtle or not, will they have to make? How is someone willing to grovel in such a shameless way qualified to hold any kind of office, never mind the Presidency?

Mark Twain once observed that history does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. I’m seeing that. I’m seeing a rhyme with the “Bearded Nonentities” of the late 19th Century. Starting with Bush Sr. It has been a sorry lot. None of the post Reagan Presidents rose above the low bar of mediocrity, and one fell far below it. We are living in a contradiction not seen often; an executive that has almost limitless powers institutionally, run by men who’s effective power is weak. Maybe it’s because they should never had gotten the job in first place. “[A]nyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” Sad, but ever so true.

Paterno Joins Catholic Church and Congress in American Hall of Shame

Our establishments are rotting at their cores with the lack of character.

We’ve seen Congress fall into ineptitude, with their one woman only “supercommittee” required because our elected representatives are too politically and morally beholden to corporations they can’t make decisions desperately needed to right our country’s economic tilt.

And now, the favored and privileged patriarchal world of college football has been leveled by the lack of character of the most vaunted coach in history, Joe Paterno, because no one involved had the strength of character to save little boys from an establishment who put sport first.

The Curious Case Of The Tweeting Twit.

Well, that was fun wasn’t it? A Congress-critter got run out of DC because he got a little too frisky on Twitter. Who knew that virtual sex could get you into bigger trouble than the real thing? DC was shocked, shocked I tell you, that this kind of thing was going on. Obviously nothing was learned from the paging DC Pages scandal that sunk the career of Mark Foley. That Internet thingy can get you into so much trouble, especially them sociable  networks.

In many ways the whole Weiner affair is a snapshot of our present obsessions. There are so many strands that bare investigation. There is the celebritization of our politics that began with JFK and just took off since Reagan. Modern politicians have to be media savvy and the best are rock stars in there own right. Barack Obama was definitely the rock star pol in the 2008 election, and Anthony Wiener also generated media heat every time he spoke.

While Politicians may love the free publicity that celebrity brings them, it seems they have not adjusted to the Paparazzi downside. They forget that being a media star means you live in a fish bowl. It means you have no secrets.

Weiner’s predilections set him up for a fall, there is no way he would have not been found out. Once found out, he would become a victim of the hyper-partisan politics that infest our nation. We have become a nation of two distinct teams: the Reds and the Blues. In many ways it is eerily the same as ancient Byzantium, and the chariot races of the 4^th century. Back then it White and Red, with occasional rioting in the streets. Today the loyalties are just as fierce, but with less rioting. It was disconcerting to see how quickly the Weiner affair broke out into a Red-Blue food fight. 

The Red Team smelled blood in the water and kept plugging away. They were helped by yet another obsession of our time, the desire for instant fame, or at least notoriety.  It was amazing to see the number of women more than willing to admit they had scored a IM photo of the good Congressman’s junk. By the end of the fiasco it felt that the number of women involved could have populated a small town.

Wanting to change the discussion, and more than willing to cut the limb that Wiener had climbed out, the Democratic Leadership spared no time in condemning Wiener and demanding his head. And that is yet another thread that bears looking at: the cowardice of our political class, especially those who claim to be Democrats. The Democrats cower before the Republican Party and their demands. The Republicans cower before the far-right Wing-Nuts of the TEA Party. No one wants to fight the crazy. Both parties are knee-deep in corruption, bought and paid for by big business. It is a long, long, long way from “Profiles in Courage.”

Is it any wonder that the general public is turned off by politics? Even if you look at the supposed “issues” that tighty-whitey-gate brought up, we can not even be serious about that. The Republicans much rather get their undeserved Puritanism on than deal with substantive issues, and the Democrats are basically whining about how unfair this was. Two major issues got lost in all the posturing. 

First,  the actual Twittering was not as “harmless” as lefties would like to claim. There is the issue that Weiner was trying to push his junk on women who had no interest in it. There is a name for this, for unwanted sexual advances, for making every discussion toward the opposite (or same) sex about purulent matters: its called sexual harassment.  There is a very good chance, if the allegations are true, that Weiner did sexually harass quite a few female twitters.  How, in Weiner’s mind, “I love your politics,” became “I want to see pictures of your junk,” is a mystery that may never be solved. That Weiner may have been engaging in multiple instances of sexual harassment kills the arguments that this was harmless and nobodies business. It is our business when a public official sexually harasses multiple citizens over a any amount of time.

Second there was the attempt by Weiner to encourage several witnesses to withhold evidence. This again proves the Nixonian meme that is never the crime that gets you, but the cover up. Whatever one thinks of the sexual harassment angle, it is next to impossible to ignore the charge of Obstruction of Justice as it applies to Weiner. 

As much as Progressives want to defend Anthony Weiner because of his outspoken support for left-of-center ideas, in the end he became too much of an issue to talk about the issues.  In a culture that has great difficulty doing any kind of nuance at all, how does one separate the issues of Weiner’s self-indulgent narcissism from the issues of political importance? As supposed members of the reality based community, Progressives have avoided the ugly reality of Weiner’s obsessions. Weiner was taking some big, foolish, dumb, risks with his sextexting and he was most likely taking other big, foolish, dumb, risks in other portions of his personal and political life. As much as it hurts to say this, Weiner had a date with a brick wall at high speed, and there is not much that could have changed that destiny. 

Whine if you must about Weiner being tossed under the bus, he made the job of the dithering Democratic leadership all too easy. Craven cowardice and self-loathing do  seem to be the default among the Donkey set. Any person who breaks that mould becomes an almost instant hero for Progressives. But as a recovering Edwards supporter I can tell you that you have to choose your heros wisely. Knights in shining armor never show up for election cycles. 

If Edwards was not enough of an object lesson, the election of Barack Obama should have drilled the lesson home; hero-worship is a bad way to choose a leader. This supposed knight in shining armor, Obama, turned out to be riding a flea-bitten creature rescued at the last minute from the knackers. His armor turned out to be nothing more than a collection of rusted-out beer cans held together with bailing wire and bubble gum. He was elected as a transitional leader, the new Aaron who would lead us out of the desert, and to the promised land. What he turned out to be was a Rockefeller Republican with the soul of a CPA. Instead of transition, we got transaction. Instead of bold leadership, we got an empty suite that had an even emptier head attached to it. Instead of a hero, we got a zero. 

And since we are speaking of zeros we can come back to Anthony Weiner; now an ex-congressman. I will miss the bold politician that was willing to tweak the nose of the DC establishment. I will not miss the self-absorbed, self-destructive man who tweeting his junk to anyone remotely interested in seeing it ( and to a few people who claim they were not interested in seeing it.) We do need Progressive leaders, and the first qualification has to be a modicum of self-control. There is a difference between being bold and being a bozo. Anthony Weiner crossed that line on a rocket sled. Is it any wonder that he crashed and burned?

AstraZeneca row as corruption claims engulf Nobel prize

The integrity of the Nobel prize was called into question last night after it emerged that a member of the jury also sat on the board of a pharmaceuticals giant that benefited from the award of this year’s prize for medicine.

Prosecutors were studying whether AstraZeneca, the London-based multi-national pharmaceutical company, could have exerted undue influence on the award.

The joint winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine, Harald zur Hausen, was recognised for his work on the human papilloma virus (HPV), which can lead to cervical cancer. AstraZeneca has a stake in two lucrative vaccines against the virus.

Two senior figures in the process that chose Mr zur Hausen have strong links with the pharmaceutical company, which has also recently begun sponsoring the Nobel website and pro-motional subsidiary. The company strongly denies any wrongdoing.
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Nobel Prize row as HIV scientist excluded

It is not the only question mark hanging over the probity of the Stockholm-based foundation. The Swedish prosecutor yesterday opened a parallel investigation into bribery allegations after several members of Nobel committees admitted enjoying expenses-paid trips to China to tell officials how candidates are selected for prizes.

Other members of the Nobel Foundation are said to be gravely concerned that the reputation of an organisation that honours the highest achievements in human endeavour is under threat from companies and nations hungry for Nobel glory.
From The Times
December 19, 2008