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January 29, 2005
A DISGUSTING ADMISSION... AND CONGRESS'S MOMENT OF TRUTH
In yet another example of how the Bush Administration is quickly being exposed as the most crooked in American history, it's been revealed yet another conservative columnist was being fed tax money from the public coffers to engage in propaganda for Bush initiatives.
Columnist Mike McManus received $10,000 to train marriage counselors as part of the agency's initiative promoting marriage to build strong families, said Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families.
The McManus revelation follows admissions that Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 by the Bush administration to publicly support Bush education initiatives, and Maggie Gallagher was paid $21,500 by the Bush administration to publically back Bush's marriage agenda.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, and you have proof of a systematic and deliberate administration policy to abuse the public trust and misuse public funds to engage in propaganda for this administration. Apparently, conservative values include fraud and deception.
But the greatest amount of pressure and focus do not fall on the White House. After all, anyone who was smart enough to be paying attention over the last four years knows that fraud and deception are nothing new for the administration of George W. Bush. (WMD's, anyone?) That's what this Republican administration is all about.
Instead, attention and responsibility now fall on the Republican Congress. It's up to Congress to do two things: first, pass the soon-to-be-introduced "Stop Government Propaganda" Act, which would specifically make it illegal to use public monies to engage in such propaganda as the Bush administration has been systematically doing. There is no excuse for this bill not finding 100 sponsors in the Senate and 435 in the House. A free and independent press is a cornerstone of American democracy, the first right enumerated in the first amendment, and Congress must show respect for the Constitution even where the Bush administration refuses to do so.
Second, Congress must convene a special committee, and hire a special prosecutor to investigate just how deep this insidious practice runs in the Bush administration, and just how high up the approvals came from. Those responsible must be exposed to public scrutiny and judgement, and where laws were broken must be held accountable.
Before any conservatives out there begin to whine about this, let me ask you a question: if ten years ago it had been revealed that the Clinton Administration had paid columnists upwards of $300,000 in taxpayer funds to propagandize the Clinton health care plan and to support gays in the military, what would the conservative reaction have been? People in the Clinton administration had grand juries convened on them simply for making money in the stock market; can you imagine what the Gingrich-Armey-DeLay Congress would have done with a revelation of paid propagandizing?
Of course, today's Republican Congress won't do anything. No one in the Bush administration is ever held accountable for anything. Condi Rice lied about WMD, and she's secretary of state now. Al Gonzales said it was okay for the US to engage in torture, and he's about to be the Attorney General. Bush deliberately misled the world about the threat Saddam Hussein posed, and Republicans treat him as the messiah. So to expect any Republican to hold anyone in the administration accountable for the payola scandal is wishful thinking at best.
The responsibility then falls to us on the left to continue exposing this president, this administration, and the conservative press for what they truly are. The left failed once in this administration already, allowing the Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld lies about Iraq to go too unchallenged and to be too easily forgotten. While the payola scandal isn't as severe a crime as lying about the rationale for war, it is an egregious breach of the public trust -- and no American should be allowed to ignore of forget the Izvestia/Pravda-like abuse of the media that Bush and conservatives engage in.
