More Moral Meltdown In America.

Now back to sex. The aforementioned Wolfowitz scandal isn't the only male/female type scandal unfolding in Washington these days. There is also the possibly burgeoning prostitution scandal. One Deborah Jeane Palfrey, has been charged with operating a high end prostitution ring in Washington, doing so from her home in Vallejo, California, yet. It is said that she had 15,000 customers -- 15,000!! -- and ran such advertisements as '"Best selection and availability before 9 p.m. each evening.'" Palfrey had been convicted of opening a prostitution business in California in 1991, but says she was doing nothing illegal in Washington, was only serving people "'from the refined walks of life here in the nation's capital,'" offering them only "'legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behavior,'" services such as massages or nude dancing. People, you see, were paying 300 bucks for 90 minutes -- a rate of $200 per hour - for dancing or a mere massage. Right. Tell me more. To paraphrase Churchill, "Some dance! Some massage!" (Churchill said, roughly, "Hitler said he will ring England's neck like a chicken." Some chicken! Some neck!)

What has Washington all in a dither, however, is what Palfrey threatens to do if the feds continue on with their charges. She says she is going to blow the whistle (bad phrase, that) on who her customers were. Already identified one way or another have been Randall L. Tobias, said to be "the top foreign aid adviser in the State Department." He previously was the Chairman and Chief Executive of Eli Lilly and AT&T International and, get this, was Chairman of the Board of Duke University from 1997 to 2000. As a government official, to quote The Times, he "ran agencies that required foreign recipients of AIDS assistance to explicitly condemn prostitution . . . ." He is a major Republican contributor, of course. Dick Morris -- Clinton's man -- was another of Palfrey's clients. We only have another 14,998 Washington names to go. The divorce lawyers should be having a field day in Washington pretty soon. Remember the movie called, I think, The First Wives Club? Maybe there will be a club in Washington entitled The 10,000 First Wives Club.

Then there have recently been some things that do not constitute moral meltdown, at least not in a culture that already is heavily debased, but instead exemplify the advertising-speak that infests our lives and culture and that inevitably leads to moral meltdown because it is so shoddy, so grandiose, so devoid of reality, so something or other, but definitely not genuine. There is a new business rag from Conde Nast called Portfolio. It is apparently designed to give you the beautiful people doing their beautiful things in the beautiful city. All very lavish, very plush, the acme of with-it. The publisher's comment to The Times was, "We're not giving you peas and carrots. We want to capture the glamour." Terrific. Lives of glamour. That's what we all lead, right? That's what's real in America, right? One wonders: did the publisher say glamour with a u, like all the rest of us glamo[u]rous types do?

There is also Steve Case, the unlamented AOL pitchman (con man?), who persuaded the fool, Gerald Levin, to sell him Time Warner and then watched the merged outfit go downhill till he, Case, had to leave one step ahead of the posse. Case has now set up a medical website called Revolution Health.com. '"There is a big opportunity to create the most trusted brand in health,'" says Case. Right -- great PR speak, Steve. People are going to trust your website, con man Case's website, more than, say, NIH's, or the Mayo Clinic's, or Johns Hopkins', etc. Steve ought to run for President. He is so honest, sincere and sensible that he would be a worthy successor to George Bush. Steve cheapens talk, and he makes the use of words meaningless, just like George and all his buddies in Washington, and therefore would be a natural to continue the moral meltdown of the country.

You know, on an intimately related subject, Michiko Kakutani of The Times recently wrote a long review of a whole host of books by Presidential wannabes: Clinton, McCain, O'Bama, Giuliani, Edwards, Romney and others. To me, the most pertinent comment in the whole long review was "Bragging is a fundamental part of these books . . . ." That was one of the relatively few serious truths one reads about the cast of hacks, bums, liars, publicity seekers and nonstop self aggrandizers who lead our politics (to disaster). They all suffer from the perpendicular pronoun disease, as they all, in one way and another, lead the country off the moral cliff.*

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