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Saturday, April 28, 2007

Another sanctimonious Republican can't keep it in his own pants
Posted by Jill | 7:05 AM
And of course this was done as part of the Friday news dump:


Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.

Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.

A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for "personal reasons."

On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the "Pamela Martin and Associates" escort service "to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage." Tobias, who is married, said there had been "no sex," and that recently he had been using another service "with Central Americans" to provide massages.


It's astounding that these guys are still using the "massages but no sex" excuse. These are the same people who railed against an impending collapse of the Republic because Bill Clinton said he didn't have sex with Monica Lewinsky, when "sex" had already been defined for the purpose of the case at hand as intercourse.

Why don't these Republicans know that if what you want is a massage, there are spas all over the country, many of them in reputable fitness clubs, where you can get a massage without going to an "escort service"?

Tobias was yet another Bush crony appointment, a former chair of Eli Lilly who had little knowledge about AIDS when he was tapped to be the U.S. global AIDS coordinator in 2003.

Here's how Tobias himself described his "credentials" for the job:

I had been in the pharmaceutical business for some years, and so I was certainly aware of the disease here in the United States, but I really didn't understand the impact globally, nor did I understand the changing nature of the population that it is affecting. So it's mostly happened since I've been in this job.


And here's what Tobias had to say about abstinence and condoms in the fight against AIDS in Africa (from the same source):


Well, the heart of our prevention programs is what's known as ABC: abstinence, be faithful, and the correct and consistent use of condoms when appropriate. This is not an American invention; this is something that President [Yoweri] Museveni in Uganda figured out over time when he recognized that there was an enormous problem in Uganda.

And it's also not "ABC: Take your pick." It's abstinence really focused heavily on young people and getting them to understand that the best way to keep from getting infected is to be abstinent and not engage in sexual activity until they are old enough and mature enough and get into a committed relationship, such as a marriage. B is being faithful within that committed relationship. And A and B, those two things together clearly had a huge impact in bringing the infection rates down in Uganda.

C recognizes the fact that there are individuals in high-risk circumstances who either by choice or by coercion are going to find themselves unable to follow A and B, and therefore they need to have access to condoms, and they need to understand the correct and consistent use of condoms. I think more and more of the experts, the people who really understand the prevention requirements with HIV/AIDS, have come to endorse ABC in a very balanced way as the appropriate prevention centerpiece.

But I would also add that as important as ABC is, the fact is that this is a disease where 50 percent of the people infected in the world are women. When I cite those numbers to people here in the United States, I find most people are astonished. They just have no idea about that. In some countries in Africa, it's well above 50 percent that are women and girls. In many cases this is driven by cultural factors, where young girls are having sex with older men and [are] coerced to do that, where women aren't regarded as equal citizens with men. So there are lots of things that need to be done addressing those kinds of cultural issues also.


So I guess we're supposed to believe that Tobias' commitment to abstinence kept him from having sex with the women he hired from a call-girl service to give him "massages". Uh-huh. And I am Marie of Rumania.

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