Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.
Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.
A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for "personal reasons."
On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the "Pamela Martin and Associates" escort service "to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage." Tobias, who is married, said there had been "no sex," and that recently he had been using another service "with Central Americans" to provide massages...
As a top official overseeing global AIDS funding to other countries, Tobias was responsible for enforcing a U.S. policy, enacted during the Bush administration, that requires recipients to swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking. USAID adopted a similar policy in 2004.
And a snippet from wikipedia:
In his capacity as Director of Foreign Assistance, Tobias encouraged sexual abstinence, and discounted the use of condoms, in preventing HIV/AIDS. "Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective," Tobias told a news conference in Berlin on April 21, 2004.[2]
So to sum up, Bush put someone who worked for chemical companies in charge of the EPA, an anti-OSHA activist at the head of OSHA, the guy who wants the UN destroyed as ambassador to the UN, a horce racing expert as the head of FEMA, and the dude who (allegedly) is a regular customer of prostitutes as the head of his abstinence campaign. Sometimes I think Bush and his friends are just having fun seeing how far they can go. ("Come on Dick, ten bucks says you can't shoot your friend in the face and then have him apologize to you on national t.v.")
(Full disclosure: my last two sentences were inspired by a comment on MetaFilter a while back.)
