It sounds like you tried everything I tried.
I honestly have no clue what the problem was, and the server logs were no help whatsoever. I have contacted my host to see if they made any changes during the process that may have taken affect when restarting apache and will post back here once they respond.
The strange thing is, the server could connect to akismet, wordpress and others via ssh. It seemed to be directly related to wordpress. And nothing was changed.