More Secret Service shenanigans

Fox News reports on the latest black eye for the Secret Service, as agents on the President’s security detail are once again in hot water:

Three Secret Service agents on President Obama’s detail were sent home from the Netherlands after apparently spending a night out drinking in Amsterdam ahead of the president’s arrival Monday.

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told Fox News that the agents had been sent home “for disciplinary reasons” and had been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. 

Fox News is told top officials are furious this happened in the wake of the 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia. In the latest incident, Fox News is told one agent was so intoxicated he couldn’t get his key to work to enter his hotel room — so he passed out on the floor in the hallway. 

Apologies to my hosts here at Breitbart if I’m using the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot label improperly for this post, but I couldn’t think of a better one.

Serious question: is the degeneration of the Secret Service a new phenomenon under Obama, or is this something that’s been slowly getting worse for a long time?  I can’t see any reason such incidents would have been successfully covered up under Administrations the media hates, while bursting into headlines under the one it loves and protects at all costs.  

Is this a consequence of the titanic entourages Obama drags with him on every trip, creating more opportunities for misbehavior?  As Mark Steyn noted yesterday, King Barack I is bringing 900 people and 45 vehicles with him on this little junket, imposing eye-popping costs on the cities he visits, not to mention a good deal of sniggering from Europeans who don’t expect such money-no-object pretentious extravagance from actual royalty.  More people in the entourage = more security personnel = more opportunities for misbehavior?

Isn’t there some point in Secret Service training, particularly with respect to Presidential security details, where they teach you not to get pickled during deployments?  For that matter, do most people have to be specifically trained not to do that during business trips?  And yet, we’re constantly getting stories about the latest State Department cover-up of misbehavior by those who formally represent the United States in foreign lands.  I’ve lately been grousing that Big Government is stupid drunk on the trillions of tax dollars surging through its veins; it’s dismaying to see highly trained government employees getting literally drunk on the job, especially when they’re overseas.