Prostitution, like drugs, IS illegal. In both drugs and sex, the authorities usually go after the sellers harder than the buyers.

That hookers usually happen to be women is irrelevant. The reason hookers are women is that johns happen to be straight men. That this pimp in this case happened to be a woman was irrelevant too. Sellers get it worse than buyers.

Drug sellers and drug kingpins do not complain that they are being targeted because they are males. (No, they complain that they are targeted because they are not white.) Whatever works. Point is, they are doing something illegal.

The johns, in these cases, get treated "lighter" not because they are men, they get treated easier because they are POWERFULL men. They also receive the treatment commensurate with the fact that they are an individual customer of an individual illegal act, while the pimp is running an entire criminal enterprise.

As with Eliot Spitzer, the DC madam chose to play in a ruthless and vindictive world and should have known the risks.

Politics, as they say, ain't beanbag. Neither is being a pimp to politicians.

Running an escort service, though, is legal. The way the prosecutors went after the escorts, to make it appear obvious that they were all a buncha whores, whatever, was intended to build a case against Palfrey that was already built by the press, including Slate.

Palfrey could hve gotten a fair trial, but not under the circumstances. The fantasy that it's all these wicked pimps debauching the innocence of the flower of America's womanhood and preying on the weakness of men who are, after all, only human -- where does this come from? Imagine, you're in Paradise. There's a man and a woman, plus one apple and one snake. That's the scenario, and in that sense Palfrey was not a woman. In every other sense she was a victim of self-promoting political prosecution.

that's funny.

It was no such thing.

She ran an illegal prostitution business with escorts as a front and she got caught. Period.

She got caught doing it in the roughest town on the planet. The town where the stakes are the highest, everything is political, and when things go south someone always gets thrown to the wolves. She knew this in advance. I suspect she enjoyed playing in that world when her stock was high.

She tried to play hardball with sharks and they ate her up.

Not sure what all that "debauching" stuff is about there that you said, in terms of my post. All I am saying is that her prosecution had nothing to do with the fact that she was a woman.

The prosecution had a lot to do with what good copy she was.The bigger the story got, the more certain it was that she was doomed, unless they overreached and screwed up.

The "hardball" was her attempt to provoke that. It worked, but they got away with their excesses and nailed her regardless.

I don't klnow why your panties are in such a bunch about hookers in Washington. There have been hookers here as long as the capital's been here. And the same is true of every state capital except maybe Montpelier and Carson City. The john culture of lobbyists and politicians is what creates it and maintains it. The john culture is all rich guys and the hookers are mostly poor women.

And of course this is about gender and privilege. The comparison to drugs is pointless and silly. Your definition of what Ms. Palfrey's business was is merely a matter of opinion. Washington the "roughest town on the planet?" Oh dear. That is...excessive, don't you think, just a little?

my initial post was in response to a todays blog piece that complained this was a gender motivated prosecution. Which is nonsense. That's all.

Both post of yours have gone into your own projections that I am complaining about prostitution, That's your invention. You have read my posts almost perfectly wrong.

Washington is the center of the power in the human universe. I suspect you are smart enought to understand this, so I have no idea why you are playing so dumb.

The DC Madam swam with sharks. It is disingenuous to complain about it now.

Washington is not the center of all that power. I live there, and I promise you, it's not. It's the administrative center of one very large national government. But power? Where do you find that?

Washington excites us because it's where the guys we get to vote for or against work. We don't get to vote for the heads of corporate boards.

I understood your rants just fine. If you can't read your own posts with reasonable comprehension, that's not my fault.

Palfrey provided entertainment to unimaginative men; fantasy dates. All the talk about sex came from the prosecution. I don't see how that's "swimming with sharks." I don't see how or why anything she actually did is even a misdemeanor, let alone a crime.

You aren't usually this full of shit. Must be something you ate. So yes, I'll stop now.

These are four of the most powerful people on earth. If someone sells them sex, or sex play, they are swimming with sharks. Even a junior congressman from some tiny state has his share of power and influence. The fact that some CEOs and mob bosses are powerful too, some more so, doesn't change the fact that DC is the epicenter. You don't see them giving all those donations to the New York Chamber of Commerce. War is not declared in L.A. (yes, yes, there are other nations on ths earth).

If the DC madam and her clients performed only and always legal non sexual services, which I doubt, I will retract a portion of my post. However the essence remains, selling anything embarassing to powerful men is dicey business, even if it is legal. She knew that going in.

Shit, even Ralph Nader knew he was going to be crucified. Michael Moore too. The Holywood blacklist, the Nixon and FBI harassment of enemies, all of it DESTROYED PEOPLES LIVES. That's what you get when you take on DC.

The evidence is right there in her death. Murdered or driven to suicide, either way, that is evidence of high stakes games. The authorities didn't hound her for fun. They hounded her because she embarased them, and because she had damaging information. Which killed her.

I'll give you Paulsen. I would bet money I don't have (how American, eh?) that he did Spitzer. Not that it was hard, given how sloppy Spitzer had gotten, and also given that what happened to Spitzer, technically, was that he got Spitzered. Poetic justice: who knew that Paulsrn had such poetry in him?

And another thing: Paulsen and Bernanke will still be around in eight months. Cheney is going to spend the next ten years and some (however long he lives) ducking subpoenas.

The kind of power Paulsen has, he had before his current job. The kind of power Bush has is all institutional, and he's stretched it to its limit. And once he no longer has a hot air machine to pump up the shreds of his image, that twenty-something approval rating will slip into the single digits.

I concede, there's a small-town-mean quality to Washington and to the jerks that get big here. Every once in a while you get one so mean and twisted (J Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn) that he holds his corner until he dies, but not usually. Yes, they destroy people's lives, but they never laid a finger on Ralph Nader, and God knows they tried.

Must have lived like a monk. And no kids. Didn't give them anything to get a hook in. Still they tried.

I am actualy surprised he is still alive. But then, he was smart enough to create institutions that would survive him.

The power of people like Paulsen still runs through Washington. There's two sides to the dinner tables of course, we mostly know the names only of the guys on one side.

Goldman et al owe their riches and continued existence to the politicans' willingness to send favors, subsidies, seed capital, and to look the other way. Essentially, the entire book of business's profits for nearly the last decade hinged on taxpayer subsidized loans via the Fed, plus GSE mortage guarantees, coupled with lax regulatory oversight.

Wall Street would not exist, would not exist in any form recognizable, if not for the largess from Washington.

There's a person who deserves our sympathy.

She may have participated in a penny ante crooked deal twenty years ago in freaking Arkansas with a couple local hotshots from Little Rock. Kind of thing sleazy yokels do every single day when they are big fish in a small pond.

Turns out their partners in crime are Clintons and two decades later they end up getting taken for a ride by one of the most unscrupulous partisan prosecutors ever. The prosecution and punishment had nothing to do with the crime. Nothing.

She ends up standing up and doing almost two years for contempt and other crimes related after a half a decade in the eye of the storm. She does eight months in solitary (solitary!) and gets shuttled around from prison to prison purely out of prosecutor harassment. The Feds try and get her three times in three ways, their hatred of Clinton and partisan agenda so intense.

That is what can happen when you get sucked into the DC machine.