No Deception Left Behind
By TOM TEEPEN
First published: Tuesday, January 11, 2005
The Bush administration's awkward relationship with the truth becomes even
more problematic with the report that it was paying -- bribing, really -- a
radio talk-show host to pitch its No Child Left Behind education program.
The proper reaction is probably indignation, but the episode seems at least
as farcical as untoward. The Department of Education shelled out $241,000
to a public relations firm to pay radio and TV commentator Armstrong
Williams to support President Bush's signature education initiative and to
encourage other media types to do the same.
But Williams is a conservative hustler, in the manner of talk radio
generally, and surely could have been counted on to hawk No Child Etc. on
his own. In effect, the administration spent good money to buy what it
already owned.
It didn't even bother to seem embarrassed. The White House spokesman
shrugged the incident off as an Education Department matter, as if that
Cabinet office had somehow come detached from the executive branch.
It was, the Education Department says, minority outreach -- in other words,
a Republican version of the Democratic Party's old "walking-around money"
for its black retainers.
Phony journalism has become something of a habit with this administration.
The watchdog General Accounting Office has twice rebuked it for creating
fake TV news segments, with actors playing reporters, and then shipping the
"reports" to pliant local newscasts to ballyhoo Bush policies.
This is, put plainly, fraud, but who can be surprised?
The administration's congenital secrecy is cover for a lot of this sort of
chicanery. An energy policy that the White House put forward as its own was
actually, we finally learned, effectively written by energy industry
executives and lobbyists, and Vice President ***** Cheney is still trying to
hide some of the information about the meetings that produced it.
Most serious of all, of course, is the Iraq war, the product of
misrepresentations, exaggerations and alarmism that falsely invoked
imminent nuclear danger and nonexistent Iraqi and al-Qaida cooperation to
justify a war that Bush's planners had wanted since the 1990s.
Armstrong Williams is a small dot in the big picture, but in his way he
epitomizes the brass of a presidency that feels entitled to spend your tax
money to play you for a sucker.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/storyprint.asp?StoryID=322183
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