[Paleopsych] Dowd: Love for Sale

[Premise Checker]

Love for Sale
Liberties column by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, 5.1.27
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/opinion/27dowd.html

    I'm herewith resigning as a member of the liberal media elite.

    I'm joining up with the conservative media elite.

    They get paid better.

    First comes news that Armstrong Williams got nearly a quarter of a
    million from the Education Department to plug No Child Left Behind.

    The families of soldiers killed in Iraq get a paltry $12,000. But good
    publicity? Priceless.

    Mr. Williams helped out the first President Bush and Clarence Thomas
    during the Anita Hill scandal. Mr. Williams, who served as Mr.
    Thomas's personal assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity
    Commission when the future Supreme Court justice was gutting policies
    that would help blacks, gleefully attacked Professor Hill, saying,
    "Sister has emotional problems," and telling The Wall Street Journal
    "there is a thin line between her sanity and insanity."

    Now we learn from media reporter Howard Kurtz that syndicated
    columnist Maggie Gallagher had a $21,500 contract from the Health and
    Human Services Department to work on material promoting the agency's
    $300 million initiative to encourage marriage. Ms. Gallagher earned
    her money, even praising Mr. Bush in print as a "genius" at playing
    "daddy" to the nation. "Mommies feel your pain," she wrote in 2002.
    "Daddies give you confidence that you can ignore the pain and get on
    with life."

    Genius? Not so much. Spendthrift? Definitely. W.'s administration was
    running up his astounding deficit paying "journalists" to do what they
    would be happy to do for free - just to be friends with benefits,
    getting access that tougher scribes are denied. Consider Charles
    Krauthammer, who went to the White House on Jan. 10 for what The
    Washington Post termed a "consultation" on the inaugural speech and
    then praised the Jan. 20th address on Fox News as "revolutionary,"
    said Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group.

    I still have many Christmas bills to pay. So I'd like to send a
    message to the administration: THIS SPACE AVAILABLE. I could write
    about the strong dollar and the shrinking deficit. Or defend Torture
    Boy, I mean, the esteemed and sage Alberto Gonzales. Or remind readers
    of the terrific job Condi Rice did coordinating national security
    before 9/11 - who could have interpreted a memo titled "Bin Laden
    Determined to Attack Inside the United States" as a credible threat? -
    not to mention her indefatigable energy obscuring information
    undercutting the vice president's dementia on Iraq.

    My preference is to get a contract with Rummy. It would be cost
    effective, compared with the latest $80 billion he needs to train more
    Iraqi security forces to be blown up. For half a mil, I could write a
    doozy of a column promoting Rummy's phantasmagoric policies.

    What is all this hand-wringing about the 31 marines who died in a
    helicopter crash in Iraq yesterday? It's only slightly more than the
    number of people who died in traffic accidents in California last
    Memorial Day. The president set the right tone, avoiding pathos when
    asked about the crash. "Obviously," he said, "any time we lose life it
    is a sad moment."

    Who can blame Rummy for carrying out policies of torture? We're in an
    information age. Information is power. If people are not giving you
    the intelligence you want, you have to customize to get the
    intelligence you want to hear.

    That's why Rummy also had to twist U.S. laws to secretly form his own
    C.I.A. A Pentagon memo said Rummy's recruited agents could include
    "notorious figures," whose ties to the U.S. would be embarrassing if
    revealed, according to The Washington Post. Why shouldn't a notorious
    figure like Rummy recruit notorious figures?

    I could write a column denouncing John McCain for trying to call
    hearings into Rummy's new spy unit, suggesting the senator is just
    jealous because Rummy's sexy enough to play James Bond.

    The president might need my help as well. He looked out of it
    yesterday when asked why his foreign policy is so drastically
    different from the one laid out in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000 by
    Ms. Rice - a preview that did not emphasize promoting democracy and
    liberty around the world. "I didn't read the article," Mr. Bush said.

    Why should he? Robert McNamara never read the Pentagon Papers. Why
    should W. bone up on his own foreign policy?

    Freedom means the freedom to be free from reading what you promise
    voters and other stuff. I could make that case - if the price was
    right.