You smell that? It’s politician sweat. There were already a slew of people trying to figure out just who in Washington made the most notorious list in national history, but now, anybody can look. Somebody’s just made the DC Madam phone book searchable online.
It didn’t take long after a judge removed the gag order that kept DC Madam Jeane Palfrey’s 46-pounds-worth of phone records under wraps to become completely accessible. It probably took a shorter time for multitudes of men to change their phone numbers.
Palfrey turned over phone records to the court after federal prosecutors came down on her hard with racketeering charges associated with an escort service she ran between 1993 and 2006. She says she turned over the records in order to find corroborators of her story that her escort services entailed nothing illegal, just sexual fantasies.
Right. Just like Bill never inhaled.
That’s what she says, anyway, but we all know it’s more along the lines of: If the government wants to take me down, I’m taking it down with me!
And already, the hypocrites are coming out of the woodwork. The biggest news was about Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter, who ran a “family values” campaign. He spilled his guts about patronizing Palfrey’s escort service before he ran for office before his name was even mentioned by anyone.
Vitter obviously missed Rule #1 of the Political Crisis Handbook: Deny, deny, deny.
Two other high-ranking officials were identified, just to prove her point that this went up to the highest levels of government: Randall Tobias, a deputy secretary of state who resigned after the press let him know he’d been found out; and Harlan Ullman, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and one of the principle architects of the famed “shock and awe” campaigns.
There’s even talk out there Vice President Cheney could implicated for “entertaining” Halliburton clients while he was CEO. But that’s just talk on the street.
At any rate, anybody with an Internet connection can dig through the phone records online. Dcphonelist.com supplies the search engine to check to see if a phone number you know is in that list.
Happy hunting.
