Why should we care whether Secret Service agents hired prostitutes? Don’t we believe in freedom?

The Washington Post reports:

The U.S. Secret Service on Saturday placed 11 agents on administrative leave as the agency investigates allegations that the men brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms in Cartagena, Colombia, on Wednesday night and that a dispute ensued with one of the women over payment the following morning.

Wow. Sounds like the last night of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not that King used prostitutes, but, as King’s lieutenant and successor Ralph Abernathy famously wrote in his 1989 autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, King, in addition to his numerous sexual affairs (including a noisy encounter heard by all his associates in a Washington D.C. hotel room right after his “I Have a Dream” speech), during the last 24 hours of his life had violent arguments with two different women he had been sleeping with. This was the actual, seedy context in which his history making speech and his martydom occurred.

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LA writes:

King came to mind because his arguments with women on his last night paralleled the reported events in Colombia. But I don’t want to single King out as unique in this department. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during their respective periods in office both went beyond adulterous, beyond promiscuous, and engaged in sexual conduct so extreme in its promiscuity that it can fairly be called depraved. Johnson’s behavior is not nearly as well known as Kennedy’s but it was at least as predatory, compulsive, and manipulative.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 15, 2012 02:18 PM | Send