White House Press Secretary Jay Carney sharply rejected criticism Friday from Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who have suggested the Secret Service sex scandal -- coupled with graphic photographs of soldiers in Afghanistan posing with corpses and reports of over the top convention spending by the General Services Agency, add up to poor management by the White House.
"It is preposterous to politicize the Secret Service; to politicize the terrible conduct of some soldiers in Afghanistan in a war that's been going on for 10 years," Carney said, accusing the two politicians of looking to turn the incidents to their political advantage.
"It's a ridiculous assertion that trivializes both the very serious nature of the endeavor that our military is engaged in in Afghanistan and the very serious nature both of the work that the Secret Service does," Carney said.
Sessions on Thursday criticized Obama's leadership and Palin emerged as a factor in the story when the Washington Post reported that one of the fired agents said in a Facebook posting that he was "'checking her out" under a picture of him standing behind her. She suggested on Fox News Thursday that it was a "symptom of government run amok" -- though host Greta van Susteren noted that the event was in 2008 -- when George W. Bush was president.