Reality continues to mirror Desperate Housewives
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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Remember the episode where suburban prostitute Maisie Gibbons is arrested and her client list made public? Of course you do. Well, a recent decision by a federal judge means that another well-dressed lady who was (allegedly) in the prostitution business can release her own little black book:
WASHINGTON -- A woman accused of running a prostitution ring in the nation's capital is free to distribute thousands of pages of phone records after a federal judge lifted a restraining order on Thursday.
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"As a result, Jeane [Palfrey] has determined to release those records under certain conditions to qualified individuals or organizations," wrote her attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, in an e-mail.
Even with the gag order in place, the Palfrey investigation managed to ensnare Bush's Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias, the abstinence-promoting former AIDS czar who apparently made use of her services. It seems that we can look forward to more public humiliations eclipsing debate of substantive issues soon.
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And I think the question that you're really touching on is what the threshhold for naming names should be in this context. Assuming other names come up, which ones are legit for publication? All government officials, or just political appointees? Representatives and lobbyists for exploitative groups like Dobson's and Robertson's? Low-paid staffers? Law enforcement officers, even those not sworn? City officials, or only federal ones?
Hell, is there a public interest served in naming ANY names? Does this expose hypocrisy, or simply allow sex politics to once again take over the national consciousness, a la ten years ago?
Although the impeachment was bullshit, it could be said that Clinton being outed as an adulterer again and again served a progressive political purpose - since his refusal to fully condone gays and lesbians in the military in part used a thinly veiled meme of "we just can't trust those gays to keep it in their pants".
IMHO, nothing advances the cause of gay marriage like pointing out the sexual hypocrisy of repressed, puritanical straight politicos. They would try and cruelly force others into a straight-jacketed lifestyle that they can't even keep up themselves.