Listeners to "The Hugh Hewitt Show" on Monday were treated to a circle jerk between a pair of conservative radio talk-show hosts, Hewitt and Dennis Prager, over the revelation of customer names in the so-called "DC Madam" case.
In case you’ve been living under a pile of soiled sheets for the last few weeks, the "DC Madam," aka Deborah Jeanne Palfrey, has been charged with running a prostitution ring. She denies the charge, claiming she operated "a high-end adult fantasy firm," and turned over her phone records to ABC News without compensation in hopes, she says, of identifying witnesses for her defense.
ABC already flushed out one high-profile customer, a married 65-year-old director of U.S. foreign assistance for the Bush State Department. The man previously guided U.S. AIDS relief efforts and, in that post, promoted abstinence and "a policy requiring grant recipients to swear they oppose prostitution," according to the WaPo.
The outing of a Bush administration official sent noise merchants Hewitt and Prager spinning like mad Monday evening. They excused the johns ("over a bad night, or two bad nights," according to Prager), demonized the madam ("a pimp," according to Hewitt), and damned not only ABC, but those who watch it.
PRAGER: I want all your listeners to hear what I have to say, and I’m sorry if it will hurt them. If they watch ABC News this week, they are sinning, because there is no need to know and they are abetting the destruction of people’s lives.
HEWITTT: There’s really no news value here, is there, ...
PRAGER: None.
HEWITT: ... other than the pornographic element?
PRAGER: Mere titillation. The Schadenfreude, the joy at other’s pain.
This pontification by "Pope" Prager and Hewitt might represent a new high (or low) in right-wing pomposity and hypocrisy. They are, after all, a pair of whining wheels in a noise machine that drove the impeachment of a president over a sexual liaison. (Is hypocrisy a sin?)
Their hysterical reaction to the DC Madam story leads one to suspect that there’s a whole lot more bad news in those phone records, and I’ll be checking ABC News to find out. I’m a naughty, naughty boy.