La Deluge

As I said when the news first broke that Armstrong Williams was a paid government shill, the notion that Williams' case was an isolated incident was just not something an intelligent and honest person could possibly believe. As gratifying as it must have been for the right wing of the blogosphere to discover that Kos was on the take from the Dean campaign (months after Kos had disclosed that fact to his readers), that was not the sort of thing I had in mind---though make no mistake: Kos has been rather impressively deceitful about the whole thing, and his basic hackishness discredits our side nearly as much as Hugh Hewitt discredits the other side.

Last night, the news broke via Howard Kurtz---who is himself a walking, breathing, gum-chewing conflict of interest, but that's another story---that Maggie Gallagher took government dough to do her thang. Since Ms. (Mrs.?) Gallagher is a Yale graduate and a subcriber to a couple of e-mail lists that I, too, am on, I received no less than four copies of her non-apology over the last 24 hours. Is her offense as rank as Williams'? Probably not. For one thing, her payoff was smaller than Williams' by a factor of more than 10. For another, she wasn't paid specifically in order to be a plant for a particular legislative item. Nevertheless, Gallagher's insistence on a rigid distinction between the profession of "journalist" and the profession of "syndicated columnist" is rather paltry. It's not quite as if anyone in the Bush administration had any doubts about what Mdme. Gallagher would have to say about gay marriage and the FMA. Columnists are self-evidently and explicitly biased in a way that beat reporters cannot be, but that doesn't obviate the bare minimum ethical obligation of full disclosure. The real distinction, which Gallagher fails to observe, is the distinction between being unbiased versus being untainted. A columnist should never be the former but always the latter.

OTOH, I may be prejudiced in my judgements about Gallagher. As I made clear several months ago, I find her to be without many rivals the single most insufferable moralizing public "intellectual" in the entire United States, if not the world. Her sociological methods are risibly flawed. They are, in fact, a shabby cover for her raging homophobia, which she always---always---sublimates into concern for THE CHILDREN. [You don't hate children, do you?--ed.] [Only most of the time--F.]

Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher....

Does anyone genuinely believe that this is the exhaustive set of fourth-string right-wing pundits who're on the dime for the Bush administration? If so, please call me, because I'd really like to talk to you.