— -- Below are some of the notable comments made Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."
HEADLINERS
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, who serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, spoke with George Stephanopoulos about the secret service sex scandal and GSA.
1. Sen. Susan Collins said that according to Secret Service director Mark Sullivan, there is no evidence that the women who were allegedly solicited by secret service agents in Colombia earlier this month were underage.
COLLINS: He told me that at this point there is no evidence of underage women.
2. Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Sen. Susan Collins suggested that the Secret Service' sex scandal could potentially have been prevented if more women were part of the organization.
COLLINS: I can't help but wonder if there'd been more women as part of that detail if this ever would have happened.
MALONEY: I can't help but keep asking this question 'where are the women?' We probably need to diversify the Secret Service and have more minorities and more women.
3. COLLINS: .… Most Secret Service agents do an extraordinary job, and they're very disciplined and professional. But what are Secret Service personnel doing bringing unknown foreign nationals to their rooms, regardless of their age?
4. Collins finds it hard to believe that this is the first illicit incident involving the Secret Service based upon who was allegedly involved.
COLLINS: Now, I recognize that the vast majority of Secret Service personnel are professional, disciplined, dedicated, courageous. But to me it defies belief that this is just an aberration. There were too many people involved. If it had been one or two, then I would say it was an aberration. But it included two supervisors. That is particularly shocking and appalling.
5. COLLINS: … I would distinguish this situation from GSA. In the case of GSA, the administration clearly bears responsibility, because the head of that agency received an alert from the inspector general way last year that...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Back in May of 2011.
COLLINS: ... there were problems, exactly, and took no action. That's very different. She was a member of the president's administration, and she deserved to be fired, and the president is responsible in that case. In the case of the Secret Service, I believe the director thus far has acted exactly appropriately and is trying to get to the bottom of it. And the president bears no role in that scandal.
THE ROUNDTABLE
Keith Olbermann, ABC News' George Will, political strategist and ABC News contributor Donna Brazile, political strategist and ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd, and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan discussed the Secret Service and GSA scandals.
6. OLBERMANN: Well, if you're going to -- if you're going to extrapolate from these two scandals to the entirety of government I think is a mistake. First off, GSA has been a problem for a long time, not just under this presidential administration. As many people have pointed out, with the Secret Service scandal in Colombia, is it possible that this was suddenly the idea of six, 10, a dozen agents for the first time, they said, "On this trip, let's go and do this"? If we have that -- the one value of what Governor Palin pointed out was that the -- sort of degrading of the code of the Secret Service began late in 2008, early in 2009...
7. NOONAN: You look at the stories of the past week, GSA and that scandal which we'll get to, the Secret Service, various other ones, you have to wonder what is going on with those adults in serious, responsible, publicly-paid-for positions, who have, it seems to me, less and less of a sense of probity, responsibility, the sort of basic adultness and maintaining of standards that we ought to be used to. It seems to me we've got a big slip going on there and these two stories are part of it.
8. DOWD: First, the hair-trigger reaction to all of a sudden any scandal, any hint of anything, anything -- because all of a sudden Sarah Palin blames it on Barack Obama, he's not a competent leader, I think is just totally ridiculous. The idea that some lower-level Secret Service guys performed very badly and did something very bad doesn't really say anything to me about the president. You can blame a president for a lot of things. I think you can't blame it for.
But for me, looking at this situation, is we've lost faith in every single -- the American public has lost faith in every single institution in this country. They have lost faith in sporting institutions in this country because of many different scandals. They've lost faith in the government. They've lost faith in both political parties……. They've lost faith in corporate institutions. They've lost faith in the media. And so they see a scandal like this, they watch this scandal, they roll their eyes, and they say, you know, this is just an ongoing thing. Nobody's willing to fix Washington. Nobody's willing to fix the crisis of the institutional faith that we've lost in here. And this to me is just another example of the American public saying, listen, I don't trust any of you.
9. WILL: Now, it is unfair to blame Barack Obama for the GSA or any of these things, because although people think he controls the executive branch, no one controls the executive branch. That's part of the problem with big government is that there's no leash strong enough to hold it.
But beyond that, this is going to have a political ramification, because the party in power believes that the federal government needs more money, should control our lives more, should be trusted with more and more of the gross national product of the country, whereas what you see with the GSA is there are few pleasures as intense as spending other people's money. That's why people run for Congress.
10. BRAZILE: And let us not get into military contracts. Let us not get into the abuses that we've seen with federal spending on our, you know, so-called, you know, war on terrorism. I mean, there's so much that we can put on the table if we want to talk about, you know, the billions of dollars spent over there or the billions of dollars being spent on conferences here in this country….. Look, this president put out an executive order. And as a result of it, he's been able to eliminate many of these conferences and to try to rein in much of the federal waste and abuse. But you cannot -- as you know, …….. we can't change Washington overnight. That culture is embedded.
Rings Off on the Road?
11. STEPHANOPOULOS: Keith, we all learned the phrase "wheels up, rings off" this week, but like Donna, I'm surprised, as well. All my experience with the Secret Service, never got a hint of anything like this.
OLBERMANN: Do you think there's -- perhaps there's a pressure building on them? Obviously, as Peggy suggested, they were almost viewed as priests, at least in a philosophical sense. And yet we have in this country, particularly the idea of the conference and the road trip, and ballplayers going on the road, and the rings come off, and this idea of being away from home. The advertising campaign for Vegas, which touches on the GSA, which is what happens there stays there. There seems to be this dynamic, this conflict between these two things. Are they priests? Or are they supposed to represent this macho side and take advantage of what the opportunities presented to them?
Keith Olbermann: Dog-Gate Exponentially Raises "Absurdity" of Campaign
12. OLBERMANN: This admission by the president that he ate dog meat as a child is in a book that he published in 1995. There has been no umbrage about this for 16 or 17 years. And the question then becomes, you know, if you want to go back to the next round of this, were Republicans pro-dog meat eating until they discussed this clip in the book? It raises the level of absurdity to something exponential…. With so many valuable questions going on, we're wasting most of the time dealing with the dogs.
Thoughts on the GOP Vice Presidential Nomination
13..WILL: If Jeb Bush is to be Romney's running mate, it would mean that in seven of nine presidential elections there would be a Bush on the Republican ticket. And it gets hard to argue that we're not a tribal society at that point.
14. Donna Brazile recommended George Will for the vice presidential position and he responded that Romney should consider Paul Ryan or Bobby Jindal.
WILL: I would pick someone 30 years younger than I am, which is Paul Ryan or Bobby Jindal, who's been a governor. I think Mr. Romney needs some kind of excitement, that is, go young, go conservative, and go someone who's so deeply in the weeds on the entitlement crisis that the country's having, and, finally, look forward to, say, Paul Ryan debating Joe Biden.