Secret Service Didn't Notice Bullets Hit White House, Is That Bad?

Sometime today Julia Pierson, the director of the Secret Service, will sit at a witness table in front of the House Oversight Committee and its chairman, the always execrable Rep. Darrell Issa, and try to answer a few questions. Such as, what the fuck is wrong with the Secret Service? Do we have to bring Clint Eastwood in to squint at everyone until they clean up their act? Which we would hate to do, since the last time we saw that guy, he seemed to have lost his mind. 

Originally the hearing was planned to talk about the incident last week when an Iraqi War vet climbed over the fence around the White House, dashed across the lawn and into the building before agents managed to tackle him just inside the door. Except whoops! Turns out the dude made it all the way to the East Room before being caught, which, as best we can tell from this graphic, is pretty damn far. Reports that the intruder was taken down one-handed by Old Handsome Joe Biden, who was wearing nothing but a loincloth and clutching a venti cup filled with straight espresso in his other hand, could not be confirmed.

This is on top of the Washington Post’s big scoop over the weekend that back in 2011, some dude shot a few bullets at the White House residence while Sasha Obama and her grandmother were there, and nobody noticed.

It took the Secret Service four days to realize that shots had hit the White House residence, a discovery that came about only because a housekeeper noticed broken glass and a chunk of cement on the floor.

Whoops!

Go ahead and read the entire story, because it really sounds like quite the fuck-up. That it happened six months before several agents were sent home from a presidential trip to Colombia because they used their downtime to drunkenly bang a bunch of hookers in their hotel does not help.

Yr Wonkette is normally very admiring of the Secret Service. The agency has a damn hard job protecting the president and his family while probably stretched as thin as some other federal agencies, and these are only a couple of incidents out of thousands and thousands of man-hours worked around the clock every day of the year. (No, they do not get to take Eid Al-Fitr off under this president.) Plus, we can’t walk to the bathroom without getting winded, let alone jog next to a limousine for several miles in a suit. But sweet merciful Allah, we hope they get their act together before the already inordinate amount of nuts who have crawled out from under their rocks during the Obama presidency start getting ideas.

[ New York Times / Washington Post ]