You know, when it comes down to it, the Secret Service agents who were fired (retired, or whatever) from service were let go because one of them allegedly decided to screw over an escort after she had spent the night in his room for an agreed amount of money that he decided not to pay. According to an interview with the woman, she agreed to come to be his escort for the night for $800, and when it came time for paying after it was all over, he tried to give her $30 and send her on her way. Now, you can think whatever you want about whether or not things were right or wrong; the reason this whole situation blew out of control was because one Secret Service agent decided to renege on the contract he negotiated with the woman.
Now, their come-uppance came about because Americans have a problem with anything that involves sex. We’re a repressed country that still seems to be stuck in a Puritan mentality, while we all sit at home and watch debauchery on television as reality programming. In other words, we want to hold people to standards that we generally don’t support ourselves.
It’s the same thing with politicians. We blow a gasket whenever we discover a politican had a blow job from a woman not his wife, but we support all sorts of other people who live all sorts of depraved lifsestyle, buying their books, CDs, going to their movies and supporting them in all sorts of obnoxious ways. Statistics indicate that Americans are imbibers in all sorts of illegal drugs (from marijuana to cocaine), yet we’ll crucify anyone for smoking a joint twenty years ago when they went to college.
Basically, we’re hypocrits who don’t know when to just turn the other cheek.
But back to our Secret Service agents. If this behavior really did take place, what we basically had was a group of executive agents who partied in Colombia with the local prostitutes. It’s not illegal there, so they broke now rules. They broke “moral” codes that are put into writing by government standards. So, as politicians will generally have sex with anything that moves, and then lie about it, anyone else who gets caught is held to standards that, well, no one else follows. The Department of Defense has been releasing statements about how its rules FORBID such activity from its own soldiers, yet if you served in the military, you saw it around practically every military post in the United States and around every military post overseas. At Leonard Wood, Missouri, I remember stepping off post and finding taxi drivers that didn’t even ask you where you were going as they were so used to driving you directly to the whorehouses located all around that particular post. It was so institutionalized that cab drivers would wait in the lobby of the cathouse to get their cut of the transaction. I remember almost getting into a fist fight with a cab driver because I wanted him to drive me to an actual restaurant where I could get something to eat, not to have sex with Asian hookers working at the local whorehouses (I know that’s what they were because the cab driver spent no less than five minutes detailing “how wonderful the Vietnamese pussy is for young GIs like you”. Suffice to say, there wasn’t a single military installation I visited or served on that didn’t have some huge prostitution thing going on around it.
The point is that the miltary didn’t care. They practically supported it. So when I hear that the Department of Defense is “disappointed” in its soldiers who may have been involved, I have to seriously laugh and ask, “what the hell are you talking about?”
What’s sort of funny about this whole “scandal” is that if the executive Secret Service agent had actually just paid the money that the woman claims he promised, he’d still have a job today. Instead, he lost his. And so did a bunch of others who actually paid their agreed upon rates. Talk about being screwed. One guy, as usual, ruined it for the rest of them.
The more interesting factor is that it does open up an opportunity to talk about the real problems of prostitution, sexual slavery and trafficking. But that won’t happen. Our reason for being outraged is exactly for those reasons, the latter ones particularly. Yet, when all is said and done, we’ll railroad a bunch of people out of government service and do absolutely nothing to make life better and safer for women who are forced into lives of prostitution by greedy men who prey on them. The window for opportunity is right now, and instead, we’ll focus on how bad the Secret Service is morally, and then politicians will use it as campaign fodder for the November election. And the band will continue to play on.