I helped in the writing of some of this article:

I helped in the writing of some of this article:


http://m.vice.com/read/obamas-secret-service-cant-get-its-shit-together

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So what gives? Why are so many Secret Service agents embarrassing themselves lately?
"The Secret Service's main cultural problem has never been sexism or hypermasculinity. It's alcoholism," Marc Ambinder, a journalist who has written extensively about the inner workings of the agency, told me. This is nothing new: Tales of agents getting too drunk to perform their jobs date to at least the Kennedy years

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Case in point is the agency's decision to send the three boozing agents home, a clear overreacton according to Dan Emmett, a 21-year veteran of the agency and author of the upcoming memoir Within Arm's Length. "Sending them home 24 hours before presidential arrival is counterproductive to the mission," he told me. "When you take three CAT agents out of a team, you just decimated that team by 50 percent, thus rendering them ineffective."

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