Secret Service Unit Hired Prostitutes

Why am I not surprised?  This is on the frontpage of the NYTimes this morning:

Twelve Secret Service agents assigned to this port city in advance of President Obama’s arrival for the Summit of the Americas were relieved of duty, amid accusations of misconduct that is said to have involved prostitution, a government official confirmed Friday.

The misconduct is said to have occurred before Mr. Obama arrived here on Friday afternoon for the meeting of more than 30 world leaders that begins Saturday.

White House officials would not comment, referring all questions to the Secret Service. News of the accusations was first reported by The Washington Post.

In a statement, a Secret Service spokesman, Edwin M. Donovan, acknowledged that agents had been recalled because of accusations of misconduct and that they would be replaced by other Secret Service personnel, but he did not address the issue of prostitution.

“The Secret Service takes all allegations of misconduct seriously,” he said, adding that the matter had been turned over to the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

Prostitution is legal in designated areas of Colombia.

Well, I guess that makes it Ok then.  It’s just our western imperialist culture that makes a big deal about prostitution.

You know, I could see maybe one or two bad apples.  But TWELVE?  This is more like a gang looking for a bang.

Of course the White House will distance itself from this incident.  You know, they actually work for the Treasury department and Obama has no control over who guards him and yadayadayada.  I don’t know.  It’s more the ambience of the White House.  Women aren’t exactly in the loop and treated like professionals or experts or anything.  And then Michelle is doing the SAHM thing.  You SAHM moms out there can whine all you like about how you’re being attacked {{eyes rolling}} but it’s working women who seem to be getting the shaft in the Obama era.   And when women repeatedly get treated with little respect, and we don’t make clear that women are not commodities, well, we shouldn’t be surprised.

You can blame the Republicans for a lot of bad stuff but at least you can’t call them hypocrites.

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More on women: I am really disturbed that Hillary Rosen felt that it was necessary once more to kiss the asses of the sacred cow we call Stay at Home Mothers.  Fume all you like ladies.  You are not doing a harder job than all the other working mothers out there.  Trust me on this because I have been there.  Your efforts do not make the world go around any more than anyone else’s. I don’t want to hear about your “sacrifice”.  If you want praise for staying at home with your kids because you loved them so much, then it wasn’t a sacrifice.  It was a choice you made.  And that choice is no better or worse than any other choice that a working mother made.  It is no better or worse and it isn’t more worthy of praise or self-righteous snootery.

It’s about time you SAHM stop looking down your noses at everyone else and clutching your pearls when the working mothers have the audacity to demand respect.  And it’s about time that the rest of us stop apologizing and worshipping at the altar of people who choose motherhood as their exclusive career.

There, I said it.  Deal with it.

 

Mather does not Cotton to the Pseudo-Puritanism of O’Keefe and Giles

O’Keefe and Giles, in their portrayal of pimp and prostitute, reek of puerile classism. Were it not for the overwhelmingly noxious fumes emanating from the handful of ACORN employees who were apparently willing to enable a child prostitution ring exploiting illegal immigrants, the stink of the ill-informed moral superiority of O’Keefe and Giles would drive evolutionarily advanced members of our species to avoid contact.

Let’s cut to the chase. The child prostitution enablement shown in the videos is beyond the pale. It is wholly unacceptable. Giles and O’Keefe deserve credit for exposing this potential for promoting abuse with ACORN’s structure.

For ACORN to continue doing the good they do for the community, they must clean their house. This said, many houses and streets in the U.S. are in need of a good cleaning.

Credit granted where it is due, I am discomforted by the prurient form of Puritanism implicit in the method O’Keefe and Giles chose to expose ACORN’s illness. Their sting starts with a young female sex worker trying to buy a home, before it lures the ACORN workers into the ugliness of underage sexual exploitation. My issue with O’Keefe and Giles is that they appear to believe that people engaged in the sex trade should not be able to have normal life dreams.

Life in the Sex Trade

Life circumstances lead some people to prostitution. In our culture, it is rarely a profession of choice. This is something our political class should be well aware of, given the large number of personally undertaken, hobby social science, in-depth probes they have engaged in over the years.

There are volumes of research on the various factors and dynamics that create the participants in the world’s oldest profession. In our culture, an experience of sexual abuse and economic vulnerability are common themes in the dynamic of becoming a prostitute.

Should being a sex worker be a barrier to living as other citizens live?

If a sex worker wants to buy a home, and she meets all of the relevant requirements for obtaining a mortgage, other than that she cannot state her profession on the mortgage application because her form of employ is illegal, what is she to do, other than lie? If that sex worker wants to do the proper thing as a citizen and pay her taxes as a self-employed person, what is she to do, other than lie?

The simple answer is that citizens who want to pay taxes and buy homes should not choose to live the lifestyle of a prostitute. This is the type of answer one expects from those who are ignorant of the dynamics that create prostitution, especially in the underage realm. For example, leaving is often not merely a personal decision and few pimps are as non-threatening as the one portrayed by James O’Keefe. Accordingly, it fits that such an answer would come from those who choose to disregard how the practice of their political philosophy enhances the conditions that create the sex trade.

In this regard, Ms. Giles words to Sean Hannity on how she conceived the project:

It’s amazing what girls think about when they are jogging. And that was just something that popped into my head. I had never seen an ACORN office, I really didn’t even know that they existed and I jogged into the wrong part of town, saw some homeless people and street ladies and I put two and two together when I turned around to get back into a safe neighborhood. And it’s like — what if these people went into ACORN — a prostitute and what would come from that? No bills, no nothing — would they get a house? Could they start a business? So we put it to the test.

It is telling that Giles was interested in whether or not ACORN would help a street lady buy a home and, apparently, not so interested in what caused the women to become street ladies. Then again, perhaps that’s simply a feature of rarely running into the “wrong part of town?” Regardless, Giles began her project with two targets, ACORN and street ladies who wanted to buy a home.

For O’Keefe and Giles, having to live with the danger, and adopt the stigma, attached to selling sexual services does not seem to be enough punishment. They appear to think there is something improper about a prostitute wanting to own a home, which, if she worked there, would also be a brothel. They seem unable to see that owning a home might serve as a base upon which to leave the sex trade. Thankfully, many ACORN employees are not afflicted by the anti-New Testament immorality that informs that type of thinking.

ACORN: The Bad and the Good

ACORN has problems at a variety of levels. It is reasonable to call for a proper audit of the organization, given their government funding. A good time for the audit might be immediately after a full accounting of every dollar of TARP funding is released to the public.

Notwithstanding ACORN’s many problems, it provides valuable community services. ACORN employees work to bring a better life to many citizens and many of these citizens reside in the underclass. Working with people in the underclass requires empathy for their circumstance and a pragmatic attitude that involves working with limited resources to bring about optimal results, which will necessarily be modest at best. To me, it is entirely appropriate for an ACORN accountant to bend a category to find a way for a sex worker to pay her taxes so she can buy a home. (Perhaps the idea of a citizen wanting to pay taxes is outside the worldview of the young Republican film makers?)

O’Keefe and Giles have done a community service by exposing rot in the structure of ACORN. Unfortunately, their methodology lacks the discipline of the precautionary principle. As a tool for the healing of the body politic, therefore, the methodology of O’Keefe and Giles is flawed, because they are willing to worsen the lives of sex workers to achieve their aim of disarming ACORN. Accordingly, the methodology of O’Keefe and Giles is unethical because it causes a wholly unnecessary amputation, where a good anti-biotic would have done the job. For this reason, I reject the pseudo-Puritanism implicit in their methodology for its lack of empathy and wisdom.

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