The White House said Friday it was "preposterous" and "ridiculous" for Republicans, including Sarah Palin, to try to blame President Barack Obama for the Secret Service sex scandal.
Palin, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions and others have said the scandal, and other embarrassments for the government are somehow symptomatic of a lack of authority within Obama's government.
White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed any attempt to link the scandal in Colombia, a row over a lavish conference held by the government's administrative agency and a furor over soldiers who had posed with corpses in Afghanistan.
"It is preposterous to politicize the Secret Service, to politicize the behavior of the terrible conduct of some soldiers in Afghanistan in a war that's been going on for 10 years," Carney said.
"What they're doing is trying to turn these incidents, one that's still under investigation, to 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."
In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Palin, the former Republican vice presidential nominee, suggested that scandal over Secret Service agents who consorted with prostitutes in Colombia last week was a symptom of a government "run amok."
"The president, the CEO of this operation called our federal government, has got to start cracking down on these agencies," Palin said.
"He is the head of the administrative branch."
Palin also condemned one of the agents who lost his job due to the Colombia episode, who reportedly wrote on a Facebook page that he was "checking her out" while guarding her during the 2008 election.
"Well, check this out bodyguard, you're fired," Palin said.
The Washington Post named two of the three agents ousted by the agency over the affair as David Chaney, a senior supervisor and Greg Stokes, a member of the Secret Service's K-9 division.
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