aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, April 29, 2007

DC Madam: GO TO TRIAL!

I so hope she does!

So now ABC News has a list of clients from a DC madam with “thousands of names, tens of thousands of phone numbers...and there are people there at the Pentagon, lobbyists, others at the White House, prominent lawyers - a long, long list.”

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the woman charged, turned down a 4 month plea deal and says she wants to go to trial. A front page WaPo story today - ‘I Abhor Injustice,’ Alleged Madam says - has more about the scandal. The first casualty:

On Friday, Randall L. Tobias resigned as deputy secretary of state one day after confirming to Brian Ross of ABC that he had patronized the Pamela Martin firm. Speaking yesterday on “Good Morning America,” Ross said Tobias told him Tobias’s number was on Palfrey’s phone records because he had called “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” There had been “no sex,” Ross quoted Tobias as saying, and that recently he has used another service, “with Central American gals,” for massages.

Tobias was director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. He previously held a top job in the Bush administration overseeing AIDS relief, in which he promoted abstinence and a policy requiring grant recipients to swear they oppose prostitution.

Pam and Josh comment on the obscenity of the “I switched to brown girls” defense.  Nico and georgia10 note Tobias’s “it was like ordering pizza” defense. Atrios says, in essence, “none of our business.”

I find the hypocrisy bad on its face, but the reason I believe it emphatically must be our business is that I believe this is what fuels our sex offender hysteria and the criminalization of our kids.

I see no threat from 16 year-old suburban boys or 17 year-old football players or 40 year-old female substitute teachers. Rather, the cultural threat is rooted in the guilt and shame of our hypocritical married 65 year-old policy makers. They’re criminalizing our kids and our neighbors for the guilt and shame they’re suffering over their own behavior!

More from the WaPo story:

Palfrey’s flamboyant attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said Friday that he has been contacted by five lawyers recently, asking whether their clients’ names are on Palfrey’s list of 10,000 to 15,000 phone numbers. Some, Sibley said, have inquired about whether accommodations could be made to keep their identities private. ABC is expected to air a report on Palfrey and her clients on “20/20” on May 4, during sweeps.

I’ll be watching.