http://www.nytimes.com/...
NY Times has it that the Secret Service isn't above the poisonous cyanide that is the Bush administration; perhaps it needs to be asked, "why not sooner?"
The mission statement of the US Secret Service, as per their web site:
**The United States Secret Service is mandated by statute and executive order to carry out two significant missions: protection and criminal investigations. The Secret Service protects the president and vice president, their families, heads of state, and other designated individuals; investigates threats against these protectees; protects the White House, vice president’s residence, foreign missions, and other buildings within Washington, D.C.; and plans and implements security designs for designated National Special Security Events. The Secret Service also investigates violations of laws relating to counterfeiting of obligations and securities of the United States; financial crimes that include, but are not limited to, access device fraud, financial institution fraud, identity theft, computer fraud; and computer-based attacks on our nation’s financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure.**
Sounds, to me, at least, like a prestegious and stressful job. Not for the faint of heart. A job where you hear extremely sensitive things; things that, inevitably, endanger your family. Or, that will.
The summation of the crisis at hand, according to the NY TIMES:
**But now the blip has become a blowup, with Secret Service agents — under oath in court depositions — accusing one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in the handling of Mr. Howards’s arrest and the official accounting of it.**
Sounds like the over arching, egregiously illegal behavior of the President and VP is finally grating on the people within the ranks who are expected to take the most detached view of all, is getting to them. The Secret Service, period, has no opinion. When asked, decades later, about JFK's womanizing, drinking, and drugging, they laugh, they comiserate, and they feel sad. He was a good man,they all agree, and Jackie was a wonderful woman; but he was sick. The pain he was in, the circumstances he was in...it just wasn't right. Never, **never** have I heard an interview where the individuals espouse their political views, their beliefs on his decisions, et cetera. **I have heard, read, watched, etc, where the former agents discuss their relationships with Truman, JFK, etc; NOT their politics.**
Moreover, I hear from this article, that the exhaustion in dealing with an extremely controversial president, a presidential campaign so intense that blogs are now bilious with malice...is taking a toll. Humans are protecting humans. Humans have limits. Professionalism has limts. Inevitably, you eat your own young.
It's time to hold the Executive branch to account. Make the legislative, our congress take the executive to the line. There are no saints in politics, but there are sinners.
Ask the Secret Service.