Senator John McCain responded in kind on Sunday to President Barack Obama’s joke at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that his 2008 presidential rival that could be the White House’s best line of defense against recent security breaches.
“I’m reporting for duty on Monday morning in my usual laid back, casual style,” McCain, a former Navy pilot, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” ‘“I’m telling you: I’ll get that Secret Service squared away.”
At the correspondents’ annual dinner, Obama displayed a photoshopped image of the 78-year-old Arizona Republican holding a broom and the president said he had come up with “a fool proof way to keep people off my lawn.”
On another topic, McCain turned serious when criticizing Obama’s new framework for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, calling it an “illusion.”
“If this deal goes through, the way it appears it is, you will see a nuclear-armed Middle East – and that’s incredibly dangerous,” the Arizona Republican said.
McCain, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also said on CNN that he would like for the drone program to be run by the Pentagon rather than the Central Intelligence Agency.
“That’s not really the job of the intelligence agency,” said McCain, a weekend after a drone strole mistakenly killed two hostages, on American and the other Italian. “That’s why they’re called the intelligence agency, and why we call the Armed Forces, obviously, the people that are supposed to be carrying out military operations.”