One of the unfortunate things that happens when a government agency comes under some well-justified scrutiny for legitimate screw ups is that people with a completely unjustified axe to grind tend to pile on and their infantile complaints tend to get taken as seriously as the legitimate ones. And so it is with the Secret Service, which has come under well-deserved fire in the last week for failing to take adequate measures to protect the life of the President.

Enter Meghan McCain, perhaps the most clueless and entitled person in all of America, who would like everyone to know that she has a problem with the Secret Service, too:

Meghan McCain joined the dog pile on the Secret Service this week, saying she’s had “nothing but horrible experiences” with the agency and likening the agents to “glorified mall cops.”

* * *

“I have nothing but horrible experiences with the Secret Service,” McCain said. “One of my friends called them glorified mall cops and I don’t think that’s terribly far off. I found them cliquey. I hated all of them.”

* * *

McCain, who revealed in the past that when her dad ran for president in 2008 her Secret Service code name was “Peter Sellers,” gave no hint of the origin of her dislike for the agency.

Allow me to perform a public service for The Hill, who certainly cannot be blamed for not knowing this information. See, I know why Meghan McCain hates the Secret Service, because I’ve gone through the emotionally and psychologically scarring experience of reading her first book. In it, she explains why she hated the Secret Service in detail. From my review of her book after it came out –

Nor was this nearly the only example of spoiled-brattishness set forth in Dirty, Sexy Politics. In her chapter on the Republican National Convention, McCain repeatedly relayed her frustration at being denied access to various events. Because John McCain was the presumptive nominee for President, his security at the convention was of course handled by the Secret Service, who no doubt worked in rotating shifts, and dealt with hundreds (or more likely thousands) of people seeking access to various events. In order to facilitate John McCain’s family’s blanket access to these events, the Secret Service distributed pins to the McCain family so that they could be waved through security without the hassle of repeatedly checking in and making sure they were on “the list.”

This wasn’t good enough for Meghan McCain, who complained that the pins made holes in her clothes and that she was “feeling rebellious” about wearing the pins. Therefore, she just decided not to wear them, and then got pissed off when she had to request Secret Service to check on her clearance for everything. Note the emphasis placed here on her sense of entitlement towards the Secret Service people who were trying to do the job of protecting her father’s life:

Forget the pin.

Remember my face.

Can you do that?

What a ray of sunshine! You would hope, after reading such bad behavior described so candidly, that a healthy mea culpa would be somewhere around the corner; something like, “Looking back, I realize everyone was totally justified in hating me, because I often acted like a real spoiled brat.” Maybe it would have more grammatical/punctuation errors, but convey the same sentiment. Not so. Incredibly, Meghan set these out in the full expectation that her reading audience would feel sorry for her.

Get it? The rest of the world is mad at the Secret Service because they did an inadequate job of protecting the President. Meghan McCain hates the Secret Service because they did the exact sorts of things to protect her father that everyone else wishes they had done to protect President Obama. In other words, if Meghan McCain had actually explained on air WHY she hated the Secret Service, everyone would have felt a little better about the fact that for the most part, they seem to be competent about doing their jobs.

Sadly, the way America consumes and processes news, this will become evidence of “bipartisan criticism of the Secret Service” rather than “spoiled idiot inadvertently proves that usually, the Secret Service does their job.” America’s still a long way from being a perfect meritocracy and Meghan McCain’s career as a television pundit attests mightily to that fact.