Secret Service Slap O' Sense Award 1/22/07

Today’s Slap O’ Sense award goes to (insert drum roll here) The United States Secret Service!
Please hold your applause until after hearing the entire list of honored activities. You will truly be amazed and your hands will thank you for waiting to clap until the end. They will probably show their appreciation with the famous yoga position: (POBACA) Patting Oneself on the Back While Attempting to Cover One’s Ass.
The Secret Service not only has a Vision Statement, they also have a Mission Statement. We all know how completely useless it would be to have one and not the other. Truly a wise expenditure of your tax money, indeed.
VISION STATEMENT
"Building on a Tradition of Excellence and Meeting the Challenges of the Future."

MISSION STATEMENT
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.
Wow! Try to get that on a t-shirt or bumper sticker! Of course, you can’t because that would probably earn you a visit from The Secret Service which would be only slightly less credible than Men In Black. Just a warning: if you have a pug named Frank, he may be confiscated.
Your Secret Service organization has been very hard at work of late. So many of their triumphs and tribulations go unreported which is a shame given how much we all need to laugh so hard we wet ourselves on occasion.
For example, (and you knew there would be multiple examples; didn’t you?) consider this recent Press Release.
“The United States Secret Service today (March 28, 2006) made public an ongoing undercover operation called Operation Rolling Stone which has targeted online fraud and identity theft through criminal web forums since 2005.”
Maybe it’s just an argument in semantics but once an “ongoing undercover operation” is “made public,” doesn’t it cease to be undercover? I know, I know: po-tay-to, po-tah-to, but I think it’s a point that must be made.
The more serious aspect though is that there is every indication that despite having the world’s strongest military force, Mick Jagger has infiltrated the highest level of our government. Our parents warned us about The Rolling Stones and their “devil music” and long hair and ugly clothes. Well, are you happy now Hippie Generation? If Secret Service agents are photographed in vertically-striped pants and Keith Richards hair, we have only ourselves to blame now don’t we?
And I’m sure I speak for all when I say the very sight of a Secret Service agent “boogying down” is not a sight for the faint of heart or the hairless of chest. Dark shades do not a cool dude make.
But the real crisis in Secret Service Land is of a more sinister nature. Apparently, they have Too Much Time on Their Hands which is a song by Styx. Do you really need another sign of the Apocalypse?
Back in October of 2006, the Secret Service in their role of Protector (see Mission Statement above) decided our President was in danger from a 20-year-old college student who posted the following statement:
“Save a tree. Kill a Bush.”
Don’t you all feel much safer now? I know I do. We can’t have tree-hugging individuals running around unfettered when we are a Country At War. For God’s sakes; anyone can see that being “green” is just handing over the USA to the terrorists in a hand basket. Let’s just give them the apple pie while we’re at it.
Also around that time of year, the Secret Service was busy, busy, busy on that major threat to motherhood, God and chocolate-chip cookies, MySpace.
A fourteen-year-old high schooler was taken out of class for making death threats against the President. She had written “Kill Bush” on her MySpace page but without the “Save Tree” comment. So, she wasn’t a complete communist like the college student was.
The young lady said the Secret Service agents “…yelled at me a lot. They were unnecessarily mean.”
We all know that the function of the United States Secret Service is to be ONLY necessarily mean. But even the best of government organizations can slip up once or twice.
Or three times.
An 81-year-old man in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania received a visit because he wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper.
He wrote the following regarding Saddam Hussein’s execution: “They hanged the wrong man.”
May I point out that he did not write who he thought the “right man” would be? May I also point out that of all the threats our country is facing: gay marriage, water bottles on airplanes, ugly hybrid cars, Bill O’ Reilly appearing on The Colbert Report, Fox news and “Family Guy,” that 81-year-old letter-writing angry, old men are just at the top of any list that would make a lick of sense.
So slurp it up United States Secret Service. You have received The Slap O’ Sense. Keep up the good work.
There are unemployed humor writers EVERYWHERE.