Day: April 12, 2010

While Mitt Romney skipped the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans last week, Ron Paul attended and gave a speech that was enthusiastically received. In the SRLC straw poll — said to be the first vote in the GOP presidential beauty pageant — Romney and Paul tied with 24 percent of the vote. Romney won on a technical, however. He beat Paul by one vote, 439 to 438.

Here are the results:

Initial Choice

(If the primary election for president were held today, for whom would you vote?)

Newt Gingrich 18% (321)
Mike Huckabee 4% (80)
Gary Johnson 1% (3)
Sarah Palin 18% (330)
* Ron Paul 24% (438)
Tim Pawlenty 3% (54)
Mike Pence 3% (58)
* Mitt Romney 24% (439)
Rick Santorum 2% (41)

Second Choice

(Who would be your second choice in the Republican Primary Election for president?)

* Newt Gingrich 20% (339)
Mike Huckabee 11% (178)
Gary Johnson 6% (104)
* Sarah Palin 20% (332)
Ron Paul 6% (98)
Tim Pawlenty 7% (114)
Mike Pence 8% (141)
Mitt Romney 14% (242)
Rick Santorum 7% (125)

In case you wondered — Gary Johnson is the former governor of North Dakota. At 57, he’s a youngster in this crowd.

But doesn’t the inclusion of a second choice on the ballot sound like something rigged to ensure that Sarah Palin would win something? What other reason could there be — except to provide a runner-up (who is not Ron Paul) who can take over if the winner is unable to fulfill the duties of the straw poll winner, for whatever reason.

It’s also interesting that she tied for runner-up with Newt Gingrich, who is the master of the game of being completely unelectable as president — never ever gonna happen — and yet maintaining status as a possible candidate in order to score lucrative book deals and speaking gigs and face time on Fox News.

But it’s apt that this beauty pageant has runners-up, even if it’s a pageant where the contestants, except for Palin, a former runner up in a real beauty pageant, are all not particularly attractive middle-aged men — a fact that may explain why one of the SRLC’s sponsors was Pfizer, makers of Viagra.

Similar to shocking — and still unresolved — rumors last fall that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, now a question has arisen about whether Fox News pundit Dick Morris has any knowledge about the death of Deborah Jean Palfrey, the DC Madam.

We are not saying that Morris was involved in Palfrey’s death. That would be snarky and disingenuous. But on April 29, 2007, during proceedings in court, Palfrey’s attorney accused Morris of hiring prostitutes from Palfrey:

Dick Morris, the television commentator and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, who resigned in 1996 after reports that he was seeing a prostitute, was also a customer, Ms. Palfrey’s lawyer has said in court. Mr. Morris has denied the accusation.

Palfrey’s attorney, Montgomery Sibley, also announced that he planned to depose Morris in order to get him on the record about his dealings with Pamela Martin & Associates, Palfrey’s escort service in the capitol.

On May 1, 2008 — just a few days shy of exactly one year after the threat of a lawsuit against Morris was made — Palfrey was found dead in a storage shed behind her mother’s mobile home in Tarpon Springs, Fla. She had been hanged. Investigators found what were apparently suicide notes, and the coroner determined the death to be self-inflicted.

But because Palfrey had many powerful enemies, presumably including Dick Morris, there has been speculation that foul play, not suicide, caused Palfrey’s death, as noted in the New York Times:

All over the Internet, from reader comments on The Lede to the far misty corners of conspiracy-theory land, hardly anyone seems inclined to accept the initial police judgment that Ms. Palfrey simply committed suicide. A quick search turns up scores of variations on the same theme: She knew too much about too many powerful men, so it must have been murder. (More about all that in a minute.)…

Dan Moldea, who tried to develop a book proposal for a Palfrey biography, is quoted by Time magazine saying that Ms. Palfrey told him she would sooner kill herself than go to prison again (she served a sentence for prostitution in California in the 1990’s).

That claim is being called a part of a cover-up by many of those disinclined to believe that Ms. Palfrey’s death was suicide, because she had often said the opposite — that she was not the kind to kill herself, unlike one of her former employees, Brandy Britton, a onetime university instructor who took her own life in February 2007 while awaiting trial on prostitution charges…

Back to the dead-women-tell-no-tales story line: It seems to be widely taken for granted that Ms. Palfrey had more, bigger, juicier names to name than the handful of prominent customers who have surfaced…

Morris, who is unquestionably big and might well be juicy, has made a tidy career out of bashing the Clintons on Fox and in books that reviewers have routinely found to be antifactual. Morris’ antipathy toward the Clintons is fueled by gigantic fit of pique that started when they fired him as their longtime political adviser just hours before the 1996 Democratic Convention, after the aforementioned prostitute revealed in a tabloid that Morris had a fetish for sucking toes.

In his aptly titled 2004 memoir, “Rewriting History,” Morris alluded to the allegation that Hillary Clinton was responsible for the murder of her associate Vince Foster. Here’s an excerpt from a review:

Morris implies that [Hillary] Clinton is capable of murdering anyone who crosses her, saying once (p. 229) that none of her close friends discusses Clinton’s private life “and still lives” and (p. 230) that if someone did speak of it without authorization “she’d be floating, figuratively, face down in the Hudson River.” For conservative cognoscenti, this is a reference to the ridiculous and totally unfounded assertion that Clinton murdered former White House counsel Vince Foster and then dumped his body in a Washington, D.C., park.

Morris apparently remains suspicious about the circumstances of Foster’s death in 1993, despite the fact it has been the subject of three federal investigations — one by the United States Park Police and two by Republican independent prosecutors, first Robert Fiske and then Clinton nemesis Ken Starr. In each case, Foster’s death was found to be a suicide.

Similarly, people with suspicions about Palfrey’s death might suggest that Morris’ allusion to the fantasy that Hillary killed Foster to silence him could be interpreted as a projection of Morris’ own deep-seated desire to silence his critics with murder.

That said, the circumstantial evidence here — that Morris was a frequenter of prostitutes, that he wrote about silencing adversaries by murdering them, that he was threatened with a lawsuit by Palfrey’s lawyer that could have killed his lucrative career on Fox News — is stronger than it is with other questions hanging out there, including the rumor that Glenn Beck murdered and raped a nine-year-old girl in 1990, the Vietnam War era stories floated by right wingers that Sen. John McCain collaborated with the North Vietnamese when he was a POW, and the equally persistent allegations among some on the right that Pres. Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia and that he is a socialist fascist Muslim.

Again, we’re not saying Dick Morris hired someone to kill Deborah Jean Palfrey, we’re simply saying questions are out there. Let’s hope Morris doesn’t make the same mistake Glenn Beck has made in refusing to address his alleged incident in 1990. If Morris hides behind a wall of silence on this issue, he could find that, like the rumors about Beck’s alleged involvement in rape, murder and pedophilia, the question could linger for years to come: What does Dick Morris know about the death of the DC Madam.

Finally, there’s this. Tarpon Springs, where Palfrey died, is the sponge capitol of Florida. Sponges are often used to clean toes — Dick Morris has a toe fetish.

You do the math.