Wonkitorial: The Latest From Babylon, D.C.

Looks like another of the Washington Crowd has been caught with his pants down hands in the hypocrisy jar:(emphasis added)

"Miz Julia" doled out a steady stream of advice, both practical and philosophical.

From her California home, she e-mailed tips to the 132 women who worked across the Washington area for the firm Pamela Martin & Associates. Her newsletters, now excerpted in court records, were a virtual how-to manual for avoiding all kinds of trouble in a business said to specialize in erotic fantasies.

"One never quite knows where evil, i.e., the vice squad is lurking in this business," read one arch entry from 1995. "The misogynists get a real kick out of surprising (shocking) you girls, when you give them the opportunity!!! . . . Therefore, you are to lock, double lock, triple lock all doors!!! . . . Figure it out, before they 'get cha'!!!"

Miz Julia was the pseudonym for Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the woman at the center of a sex scandal that has caused a deputy secretary of state to resign and has lawyers calling around town trying to keep their clients' names out of public view. A one-time law student, Palfrey ran for 13 years what she insists was a legal escort service. Federal prosecutors allege she was providing $300-an-hour prostitutes, and a grand jury indicted her in February on federal racketeering charges.

Palfrey piqued fascination -- and anxiety -- by first threatening to sell phone records that could unveil thousands of clients, and then handing them over, apparently for free, to ABC News. She is scheduled to appear tomorrow in U.S. District Court in the District.

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, who is 65 and married, 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.

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.

More revelations are in the offing. Ross said the list includes the names of some "very prominent people," as well as a number of women with "important and serious jobs" who had worked as escorts for the firm.

Read the backstory about this whole sorry episode right here.

This is just another incident that seems to support the idea that over the past few decades, Washington Babylon-on-the-Potomac has become little more than a cesspool of non-stop depravity, cronyism, reckless spending of the public's money, and gross administrative incompetence.

While our nation is in the middle of a supposed "war" on terror in which thousands of our nation's young people are getting killed and maimed due to a lack of proper equipment, (such as up-armored combat-ready vehicles) the Washington Crowd New Babylonians seemingly do little else besides party, travel on taxpayer-financed sightseeing junkets, and play endless rounds of employer-employee grab-ass while marking time in their plushly-appointed (again, at taxpayer expense) office suites.

In his first inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Mr. Regan went on to say:

"We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we're sick--professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, "we the people," this breed called Americans.

So, as we begin, let us take inventory. We are a nation that has a government--not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government..."

During the 1992 Presidential campaign, which ended-up being won by Bill Clinton, (who just may be the most morally bankrupt man to ever hold the office) then-candidate Ross Perot spoke about the need for someone to go to Washington Babylon-on-the-Potomac and, in his words, "clean-out the barn."

President Reagan's call to reign-in an arrogant and increasingly overbearing federal government continues to resonate today while that barn of which Mr. Perot spoke about is still in need of a thorough cleaning.

We hope that any and all of those who are involved (be they Democrats or Republicans) in this latest scandal among the nation's ruling so-called "elite" are exposed and held up to the public ridicule that they so richly deserve at the hands of the hard-working, over-taxed, and over-regulated folks who live out here in what these Washingtonians New Babylonians sneeringly refer to (while in attendance at any one of their numberless pickup-parties-in-the-guise-of-office-cocktail-mixers) as "fly-over country."

Stay tuned. -----------------------------See our latest posts.