Yes, the White House was sprayed by bullets

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson had no choice but to resign last Wednesday. She did it a week or two late, but she did the right thing.

The vaunted federal agency, whose core duty is to protect the president of the United States, his family and his home, has become just another bungling Washington bureaucracy led by incompetents and political appointees.

Earlier this week we saw Pierson on TV being upbraided by lawmakers from both parties who could not believe how the Secret Service has turned into the Keystone Cops, AKA, “Security Breaches R Us.” Pierson was at times evasive, uninformed and self-contradictory during her testimony.

She had been appointed to head the Secret Service in the spring of 2013 after agents on an advance team were caught drinking excessively and procuring prostitutes in Colombia. That was shame enough. But under her brief reign, the Secret Service’s standards apparently fell so low they couldn’t be counted on to keep the president or the inside of his house safe.

The White House complex is protected by the Secret Service’s 1,300-person uniformed division, which became part of the agency in 1930. The personnel who didn’t notice the White House fence-hopper were not highly trained agents like the heroes who threw their bodies in front of my father when he was shot. Those elite agents — members of the PPD, or presidential protection division — travel with the president wherever he goes. They also provide protection 24/7 for the president’s wife and children. That’s why, for eight years I, my kids and my home in L.A., had constant Secret Service protection.

The agency did a great job in the 1980s. But today the Secret Service has become dangerously careless or complacent about basic security measures at the White House.