More On Maggie

Greg Beato does some retrospective and follow-up on Maggie Gallagher (the head honcho of Maggiegallagherism), her persistent mendacity, and her hypocrisy (hat tip: Matt Welch).

I've become less and less neutral about this whole thing since yesterday (not that I was terribly neutral then---put it this way: I'm more confident that my judgement isn't just the result of prejudice against Maggiegallagherism). Gallagher's claim that she would have disclosed her $21,000 holiday bonus from the Department of Health and Human Services if only she had remembered it is 1) fatuous and 2) the sort of thing a guilty conscience says. She knows she did something wrong, but her big regret is that she got caught. (And look, National Review is changing its contract policy as a result of this.)

The worst detail of the whole affair, which as Beato points out, Howard Kurtz didn't mention, is that in 2003, she testified before the Senate in her role as a "marriage expert" [N.B. a vocation somewhat less reputable than astrologer--ed.] during subcommittee hearings which I think lead up to its debate on the FMA. In other words, Gallagher testified as an independent expert on the merits of a policy that the government was surreptitiously doling her money to support. (Note to Cornerites: There's no difference between paying her to promote a policy and paying her to find out what she knows if the government already knew that what she knows is that she likes the policy. Alles klar?) If that's not an ethical violation, I have an ocean-front property in Arizona to sell you.