Something Rotten in the State
With the number of Secret Service members and agents caught up in the partying-with-prostitutes scandal in Cartagena now at a dozen, and six already gone, how much wider and deeper does this go?
No one can take pleasure in seeing Secret Service agents—whose deserved reputation is that they will "take a bullet" for the president, his family and all whom they protect—shamed and disgraced.
Yet one would have to be naive to believe this was some isolated incident. No sooner was the first day's work done in Cartagena than 20 hookers were trooping into the hotel rooms of SS agents, supervisors and members of the military advance team.
And Sen. Charles Grassley asks a relevant question.
As the Secret Service travel and work in close contact with the White House Advance Office and White House Communications Agency, was the Obama staff oblivious to this misconduct? If they were aware of it, did no one report it to the White House chief of staff?
Hostile intelligence services often use "honey traps" to ensnare U.S. diplomats and journalists. Thus this hookers-and-agents scandal is no laughing matter.
And it hit just as we learned that the General Services Administration, purchasing agent for the U.S. government, shelled out $823,000 on a party for 300 employees at a casino-spa in Las Vegas, where the hired entertainment included a mind reader, a clown and a $75,000 bicycle-building exercise.
Jeff Neeley, the GSA western regional commissioner, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify to Congress about what is now being investigated as criminal misconduct.
President Obama's appointee to head GSA, Martha Johnson, has resigned.
Infinitely larger in terms of the tax dollars looted or lost is the Solyndra scandal, where a green technology company favored by the White House went belly up after receiving an endorsement visit from Obama and an astonishing half-billion dollars in federal loan guarantees.
These events all point to a culture of entitlement born of a belief that now that the Democratic Party, the Party of Government, is again running the government, we can "let the good times roll" once more.
And so we see President Obama for six months literally campaigning on the public dime. Not a day seems to pass that he is not helicoptering off the White House lawn on Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base to board Air Force One to fly to some swing state, while his staff finds an official cover event so the White House can charge most of the trip to taxpayers.
Has any other president spent so many days campaigning, half a year and a year before the traditional Labor Day start of the election season, or used tax dollars so flagrantly to buy re-election?
The sense of entitlement appears to extend to the Obama family.
In 2010, at the bottom of the Great Recession, Michelle Obama, accompanied by daughter Sasha and friends, took Air force Two to Spain for a lavish vacation. The first lady paid for her stay at a five-star hotel in Marbella, but the cost of flying her there and moving her about, with scores of Secret Service agents, had to run into the millions.
And the trip came at a time when President Obama was instructing the nation on the need to sacrifice and the number of Americans on food stamps was setting a new record every month.
How many so-called "1 percenters" project a lifestyle as lavish?
Last December, flying out of the District of Columbia in separate planes, the first couple took a two-week Christmas vacation at a resort in Hawaii, the taxpayers' cost of which has been estimated at $4 million. Winters in Hawaii, summers in the Vineyard, and with it all subsidized by taxpayers?
What kind of example is this? Where is the spirit of sacrifice here?
Is this the same president who talks about having inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s?
Lately, we learned that Leon Panetta, in the 10 months he has been secretary of defense, has spent $860,000 of taxpayers' money on 27 separate trips to his home in Monterey, Calif.
Curing Leon of his homesickness is getting expensive.
What all of the above reveals is how the Party of Government views the government. They see its perks, privileges and power as their entitlements, their inheritance, their patrimony.
And there is some truth to that.
After all, the bureaucracy was built up in the New Deal and Great Society, and remains dyed-in-the-wool Democratic.
Even when the GOP wins the White House, the conservatives are outsiders in this city. Even when Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan won their 49-state landslides, neither came even close to carrying Washington, D.C., the sole Electoral College precinct that has never gone Republican.
While John McCain lost the nation by eight points to Obama, he lost Washington, D.C., by 86 points. This is Obama's town. He owns it.
But if a noxious aroma of self-indulgence and corruption is arising from it, it is Obama's problem, and it is no longer a small one.
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Just to play Devil's Advocate:
What are a few hundred thousand dollars or even a few millions in a budget that goes to trillion? Not much, right?
So the sin here was of greed.
Which is the Original Sin of man, and will not disappear in our lifetimes.
That said, Obama's calls for sacrifice are bogus. If everyone in a nation has to protect their family or group interest, of course they shall strive to suck the most out of the system and give as little back to it. It's why so many people stay out of the taxpayer class through use of tax credits (smart move, I say). What do you show by offering charity to a government? I mean, if we take democracy rhetoric at face value, then you are the government. And there is no need for you to show charity to yourself.
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"The rent is just too damned high."
Prateek,
My real reply or perhaps a more serious reply is that there is nothing that can be done at this point except to allow the egos in D.C. to exhaust themselves and their own desires under the cover of doing good for others and their country.
"If the citizens themselves devote their life to trading, the way will be opened to many vices. Since the foremost tendency of tradesmen is to make money, greed is awakened in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade. The result is that everything in the city will become venal; good faith will be destroyed and the way opened to all kinds of trickery; each one will work only for his own profit, despising the public good; the cultivation of virtue will fail since honor, virtue's reward, will be bestowed upon the rich. Thus, in such a city, civic life will necessarily be corrupted."
Don't forget the Obamas' lavish Christmas vacation off to a grotesque resort somewhere in Hawai'i... what did it cost, something like $4 million?
I'm sorry, many people take humorous pleasure in this phony "scandal." It is indeed not only a laughing matter, but a great one. The whole country & half the world is laughing, if you had not noticed. But to think that this reputed horror is directly proportionate to a "culture of entitlement," rooted solely in the decadant party now in power, is ludicrous and -- to borrow PB's term -- much more truly (and dangerously) "naive."
It is ancient knowledge that the breed of men who would "take a bullet" for a President (or a spear for an Emperor) has a higher than ordinary quota of the sort who would pay, say, a Brazilian hooker for sex. Yes, I would genuinely prefer that they spend their spare time reading, seriously contemplating and debating Melville, Shakespeare, or for that matter The Imitation of Christ. But the fact of life is that's not soon going to happen. And if it did, one might then genuinely question whether the present stock of "protectors" also had the hightened and sharpened physical reflexes to be able to save Nero when called upon. The sort of culture of top-notch physicality and lightning reflexes, necessary to perform on the level of the secret service, simply, does not go hand in hand with the type of man found at home in a faculty lounge, a vickarage, or for that matter any everyday modern office. Nor can everything that comes with such a man be so easily switched on and off. And if you don't know that, then you don't know anything.
Nor is this to say that there are not some, even many loyal husbands, Christian gentlemen, or for that matter virtuous pagans among such crews. Always, too, there will be such, and they are among the finest men you will ever have the grace to know. But your daddy should have told you, they can't all be that way. And PB really ought to know better than to come on like a shocked out of his wits grandma. It seriously undercuts his stature as a seasoned veteran of American public life in this, our time -- which hardly just started.
Yes, there is some correlation to those presently ascendant -- in DC & elsewhere across the USA. And not only in the USA but across the West, tainted and degraded by the ever more openly pornified Western culture and its makers -- a deep pocket, incidentally, for both American parties. Absolute crass materialists at the top (whether the Gramscian Marxists of the present moment, or the Ann Rand cultists now hot on their heels) doesn't help. It puts out a little message; "the coast is clear."
Ah for the good old days, when JFK & his cronies rollicked in Bing Crosby's pool with their chippies, and our good decent secret service agents across the desert space, straight out of Father Knows Best, weren't sure those were coyotes in the background (Cf The Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour Hirsh). But what kind of example is the One's spending & lavish lifestyle, you ask? Really. JFK's personal sordidness, much deeper & more cynical on a direct human level, anyway -- treating his lifesavers as actual pimps --did not as far as we know cause his own Alpha male secret servicemen in 1962 (who were doubtless there) to come out with something like we are now seeing. (Assuming of course that what we are now seeing is genuine, not politically engineered by somebody, like so much "news").
So what was really different then and now? You might ask your son between Viagra commercials. Or check out what your daughter is saying to her "facebook friends." And while you're at it, consider what you earnestly believe each of them is "entitled" to.
Mr. Reavis,
It may seem childish to wish for a "like" button in these threads, but sometimes I think hilarious posts like yours deserve the option of instant approval. Such wit deserves encouragement.
While it may be true that being a choirboy isn't necessary to be a secret service agent, that is irrelevant to the point made by Pat Buchanan: hostile intelligence agencies can set honey traps and compromise the President's security.
I made that point, perhaps in a slightly cruder summum, to a fellow American colleague when I first heard of the scandal: "These are men trained to take a bullet for the President, a president half of them probably don't like and didn't vote for. Let 'em indulge themselves every now and then, huh?"
On the other hand, ever see the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, Evita? I'm not sure how true-to-life the portrayal of Eva Duarte was, but the words of the soldiers in the midst of the Peron-Duarte affair ring quite true for almost any situation of this sort:
It's no crime for officers to do as they please,
As long as they're discrete and keep clear of disease
We ignore, we disregard
But once they allow a bit on the side
To move to the center where she's not qualified
We are forced to mark his card
There is indeed a sense of entitlement, not in the welfare sense, but in the sense of libertine "rights" claimed against evil oppresive social mores, to do as one pleases. What we HAVE lost, since the days of Jack Kennedy, is this notion: you do not have a RIGHT to engage in extramarital dalliances; you are permitted to do so as an indulgence, and if you are exposed, you are CERTAINLY not permitted to whine about the attack on your "dignity," as Bill Clinton seemed to.
The flip side, of course, is that the general public has come to regard private sexual lives as legitimate entertainment and considers it has the right to probe someone's sex CV. That is shameful. Only blood recipients and potential marital partners can claim any "right" to know the past of another, and only that specific person.
With all this in mind, an orgy involving 20 whores, while perhaps not all that shocking in historical perspective, is most certainly worthy of outrage and severe sanction. This goes beyond any sort of discrete impulsive peccaminous dalliance (i.e., taking home a girl one charmed at a bar or picking up a prostitute on a street corner): this was orchestrated in the manner of a bacchanalium (I admit to exaggerating perhaps just a tad).
The cases of the GSA and the Secret Service are fundamentally different. While both reflect the hedonism and corruption of government service, the follies of Secret Service operatives in a foreign country are quite different. They may think they were off the clock, but they were not. They had a mission which they compromised by hanging out in clubs, getting drunk, picking up strange women and taking them to their rooms where there were weapons, documents, and information regarding a presidential visit, If sentries can be shot for falling asleep on duty, these guys deserve something worse. I could not care less about their marital infidelity--except insofar as it indicates an unreliable character--or their vices, but they compromised their mission.
I heard, a few days ago on NPR, a caller who had applied for a job in the SS. He got far enough in the process to have a three hour interview in which the main concern of the interviewers was to find out if he was willing to be a party animal. This sort of behavior is not an aberration in the SS, it is SOP. The head of the agency--a career SS man--should be canned with a reprimand and everyone in the chain of command who knew of such behavior should also be eliminated.
"Yet one would have to be naive to believe this was some isolated incident. No sooner was the first day's work done in Cartagena than 20 hookers were trooping into the hotel rooms of SS agents, supervisors and members of the military advance team." Pat Buchanan
This sort of behavior is not an aberration ...., it is SOP. Tom Fleming
From the Soviet Embassy scandal with Marine Guards, to Abu Ghraib to Cartagena the formal assertion that consenting adults left to themselves will come to great good is rotten non-sense. Sexual conduct and mission accomplishment were disconnected by law many moons ago for some our most honorable institutions. Putting the genie back in the bottle at this point is not going to happen for a while --- it is an attack on women, it is hateful, it is discriminatory ( which of course the SS and Marine Corps have been from the very beginning. --- they never were designed for every citizen who lives and breaths. Their very nature is discriminatory and should be.) The old Army Colonel, Robert Hickson noticed all this a few years in a piece he wrote for Chronicels a few years back about visiting the base exchange at West Point.
It is of course fair and just for Tom Fleming and Pat Buchanan to speak their minds about such things as they have predicted these coming disasters for years. It is quite another to listen to the party line types who are now acting shocked and outraged that the very institutions they helped liberate are tending towards corruption and less than honorable conduct. Mr. Frum and his cheerleading squad at National Review and cable news should once again consider who exactly it was that has turned their back on their country.
The concept of a "honey trap" and its danger is essentially wedded to the presupposition that the organism is not already fatally invaded from the top. Yes, it is a "security" danger. But the proportion of that danger to the danger already created at the top is relatively small. The fact is, in not only a figurative sense, a truly "hostile intelligence" is already ensconced far above the level of these potential "honey traps."
To be enraged about the spectacle, and the diversion from mission it illustrates, is to betray a now almost antiquarian degree of basic uprightness and soundness, all but totally disappeared from both public and private life. But there is a more unsettling point -- and sorry, PB did miss it. The culture of entitlement & greed is hardly localized in the present Democratic Party, government party, or whatever you want to call it, but also in many, many others that have "turned their back on the country" by erosion of their personal moral sense. The cultural meltdown in the USA, now extending over decades, was the chicken to this egg, and making this scandal a debating point about "the party of government" in the 2012 election is ludicrous. The correlation to the presidential life style & GSA is not causative; it is simply to point out other boats on the same sea.
JFK created an atmosphere around him with more "honey traps" than holes in Swiss cheese, including sharing a top crime boss's moll. These glaring dangers were intimately close, not separated by Rube Goldberg distance like the hypothetical honey traps of this present scandal. We have also had at least one president since JFK who likely indulged in such lunacy on an even grander scale, although that history is yet far from written. But we do know this: neither resulted in an assassination. While mob hands may have been all over the JFK assassination, the killing did not result from the plethora of open leaks available to the mob by the president's own conduct. If the mob was involved it was by setting up a perfect crime with classic use of 2 hit men (Ruby & Oswald) connected to each other & to the mob itself by evidence still plausibly deniable half a century later.
The real case for mob involvement in that crime is the heavy note of retribution for mob political support & $$ betrayed. This is what JFK (& the country) never foresaw. Yet it was an inherent & serious risk in the indulgence of Vegas culture, Rat Pack pals, etc -- admittedly lite decadence by today's standards. But the vision to peer through the cultural murk was already disappearing.
The fact is, if the true horror story -- having Gramscian Marxists in today's White House (even good, clean living family types) -- does not trouble the nation, then the nation has no right to be affronted by anything surrounding the White House, its employees & staff, or its so-called security. These are sideshows. The issue is far behind "entitlements" & one party's trumpeting of same. It is about a new leadership concocted out of vacuum entirely free of, and hostile to, any Western tradition, political, religious, work ethic, whatever.
The agents caught cavorting deserve to be fired, of course, but this is not news because it is an employment issue. It is news because it is a tiny scrap of a sort of moral unmasking that did not occur in JFK's lifetime, and it is therefore rightfully laughed at. True, it is sad humor in context -- not that of a truly free people, anymore, but more akin to seeing the premier's pants unzipped on the day he shows up for tea at your local branch of the writer's union. Doubtless much of the noble indignation expressed in the responses here is partly related to the sick feeling in the gut that yes, that is where we now are.
So far our Praetorian Guard is amenable to being kept at heel by the appeal to their libido sentiendi. They do not appear to be near the stage they came to in the time of Tiberius. If and when they do, I'll be more interested in their goings on.
For now, I note that this is another example of the trickle down of immorality from our so-called elite to our once pious and respectable, if not altogether holy, working class. First they destroyed our job base by destroying manufacturing, then after this softening up it was only needed to make the cavorting of the Kennedy class into a respectable choice for the way to be cleared for the slide into amorality for all.
For now, I note that this is another example of the trickle down of immorality from our so-called elite to our once pious and respectable, if not altogether holy, working class. First they destroyed our job base by destroying manufacturing, ..... then .... after this softening up ... it was only needed to make cavorting constantly .... into the respectable choice..
Yes, Gilbert, I agree. The Bunny Ranch outside Las Vegas is one thing , the Best Little Whore House in Texas is another, sailors and merchant marines have always been notorious for discovering uses for penicillan before penicillan, but this "chicken in every pot" business is part of the decline,although it has held Washington together for years and could for some time.