The Bush Administration has once again been caught up in its own bullshit.

Randall Tobias, an Abstinence Czar in charge of AIDS foreign aid, had to resign in a hurry over the weekend after his name was linked to “a Washington call-girl ring”, as the Washington Post rather antiquely put it.

Antique because so-called “scandals” involving joy girls — or joy boys, for that matter (like the model playing one at right) — are amusing non-starters for most of us, including the Washington Post.

Especially when such merely human peccadilloes are placed against the backdrop of recent and truly egregious Bush fuckups — the mismanagement of military aftercare at Walter Reed Hospital, say, or the systematic leaking of an undercover CIA agent’s name by a White House intent on selling a war with disinformation.

The only reason the call-girl story has traction is because Republicans are involved, and not just Republicans but those who have set themselves up as caped crusaders in a “morals” war on sex.

Roy Sekoff for The Huffington Post:

Another GOP hypocrite bites the dust. Joining a dishonor roll that includes anti-child-predator predator Mark Foley and anti-homosexual homosexual Ted Haggard is Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias, a pro-abstinence zealot who couldn’t abstain from enjoying the services of D.C. Madam Jeane Palfry’s escort service.

I really don’t give a damn what Tobias does in his down time; it’s the endless hypocrisy of the holier-than-thou crowd on the right I can’t stomach.

As Bush’s “AIDS czar” Tobias deemphasized the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, instead promoting abstinence and faithfulness. While ordering up hookers. Oh, that’s right, Tobias, who is married, claims he didn’t actually have sex with the escorts he hired; he paid “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.”

The question is: Did randy Randy wear a condom when he wasn’t having sex?…

It turns out that Tobias was the Bush administration’s point man on a policy that required U.S.-based groups receiving anti-AIDS money to take an anti-prostitution “loyalty oath.” As part of this effort, President Bush signed a presidential directive calling prostitution “and related activities … inherently harmful and dehumanizing.”

So once again with the Bushies it’s: “Do as I say, not as I do… and could you do that thing again where you rub your hands together like you’re starting a fire?”

Ah yes, it’s the Bush Administration. Anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-science: totally bullshit.

And, of course, it’s all Biblically based.

All a cynical pandering by elite, educated Republicans to the backwoods wing of the American people, who have been swept up in evangelical death cults and an End Times theology of revenge.

People, in short, who have an unhealthy interest in what other people are doing when their clothes are off.

But that too is collapsing around the Bush regime. Take the bogus claims about condoms and abstinence that are distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services, now under full evangelical Republican control.

From Christopher Lee for The Washington Post:

Condom Information in Abstinence Programs Called Inaccurate:

Each of these assertions turns up in federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs: Condoms fail to prevent HIV infection 31 percent of the time during heterosexual sex. The chances of getting pregnant while using a condom are 1 in 6. And condoms break or slip off nearly 15 percent of the time.

And each of them is wrong, says John S. Santelli, a pediatrician and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

In a 20-page document submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services this week, Santelli detailed what he calls “misleading” and “scientifically inaccurate” information in three curricula used by programs that receive federal abstinence-only funding…

“[The Department of Health and Human Services] has been alerted numerous times, and they haven’t done anything,” said Ava Barbour, an ACLU staff attorney. “Studies have shown that the vast majority of Americans do not remain abstinent until marriage, and they need to have this vital information to protect themselves.”

In the ACLU filing, Santelli said the 31 percent figure regarding condoms and HIV was from an outdated 1993 study. More recent studies show that the risk of an HIV-negative person being infected by an HIV-positive partner is reduced by 80 to 87 percent if condoms are used every time they have sex, Santelli wrote.

Authoritative studies also show that the chances of an unintended pregnancy while using a condom are not 1 in 6, Santelli wrote, but about 2 percent over the course of a year if condoms are used correctly every time. And condoms break or slip off less than 4 percent of the time, not 15 percent, Santelli wrote.

But science and its relentless, repetitive evidence to the contrary has never held much weight for the Left Behind, faith-based crowd. As the Washington Post points out, “The [abstinence-only] materials have been the subject of political and legal battles for years, with critics, including Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), contending that the Bush administration has ignored inaccuracies in the service of conservative ideology.”

As Christopher Hitchens said in a debate on Book-TV C-SPAN2 this weekend, “We’re a half a chromosome removed from chimpanzees, and our religious beliefs bear that out.”