At the time George W. Bush gave his speech to the UN, the speech that everyone expected would be devoted to Iraq, the amount of time devoted to the evils of the international sex trade seemed mysterious, even inexplicable. The best explanation I could come up with at the time was that it was filler thrown into the speech becuase the warring factions within the administraiton couldn't agree on much else.
Now, though, an alternate explanation is taking shape: Karl Rove is a genius. The speech was an attempt at political innoculation against the potential corrosion from the Neil Bush sex scandals stemming from his divorce case.
Here's how even staid CNN describes Neil Bush's deposition testimony in his divorce case:
He admitted in the deposition that he previously had sex with several other women while on trips to Thailand and Hong Kong at least five years ago.
The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and had sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them.
“Mr. Bush, you have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her,” Brown said.
“It was very unusual,” Bush said.
One has to wonder whether Neil Bush is so stupid as to not have figured out what was going on, or whether he's so stupid as to think this lack of knowledge is credible testimony. But that's almost beside the point.
The point that matters is that this incident just might explain why GW felt a need to get on record on the sex trade issue?
Of course, the real irony here is that the political innoculation was probably unnecessary. It looks as if there won't be a Neil Bush sex scandal: the press is playing this one with even more restraint than the circumstances warrant … the exact opposite of press behavior during the last adminstration.
