AIDS Czar Caught With His Pants Down
Posted on May 3, 2007
By Ellen Goodman
BOSTON—I don’t need to give the “D.C. Madam” a whole lot more attention. After all, editorial pages don’t have sweeps weeks. And the client lists she’s dropping into the media maw may have as many flaws as the beauty advice she gave her workers to use “fat cream for the thighs.”
Besides that, I try to heed the words of the Mother-of-us-all when judging the private lives of public people. Susan B. Anthony herself once said, “If a man’s public record be a clear one, if he has kept his pledges before the world, I do not inquire what his private life may have been.”
But I do think even Susan B. would give me a dispensation on the subject of Randall Tobias.
The deputy secretary of state resigned last Friday after admitting he was a client of the service described on the Web as “a high-end adult fantasy firm which offered legal sexual and erotic services.” The 65-year-old married man did not admit to having sex with those women, but said he had the $300-a-visit “gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” It was, he said, like calling for pizza.
Well, Tobias was not just your everyday CEO-turned-bureaucrat. This is one time that “private life” and “public record” are as tightly wedded as a pizza and its toppings. As the first global AIDS czar, Tobias oversaw American public policy for foreign private lives. He was in charge of doling out sexual morality with the money.
...(snip)...
For the past six years, the Bush believers have been drawing ideological blueprints in Washington—whether for Iraq or for the homeland, in foreign policy or domestic. When this money doesn’t pave the way to success, their solution is to widen the road into a highway. When that doesn’t get us any closer to the destination, they widen it into a superhighway and call it a surge.
In his book, “At the Center of the Storm,” former enabler and belated reformer George Tenet writes, “Policymakers are entitled to their own opinions—but not to their own set of facts.” If that’s true for the policies in Iraq, it’s true everywhere.
Tobias was hoisted on his own pizza. The price he’ll pay for his “gals” is humiliation. But the biggest flaw in the world of this president and his enablers is not hiding their eyes from human frailty. It’s refusing to face facts. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/aids_czar_caught_with_his_pants_down/ 
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