Armstrong Williams Is Bush's Fault!

My local Winston Salem Urinal never disappoints. On today's OpEd pages there's one column about Budweiser suing Billy Budd Beer, a column by William Raspberry bashing Bill Cosby because his message to blacks about education is comprehensible to whites, and one editorial sounded astounded that blacks, whites and hispanics can work together without race being the only topic of conversation.

The other editorial, all three letters and the other two colums are (surprise, surprise) telling us how President Bush is the personification of Evil! One of these columns in particular caught my attention.

The column is by John Young, of the Waco Tribune-Herald. In the Urinal the title is, "Where is outrage over use of tax dollars" but the original title when it was published on January 13th was, "Underwriters of illusion". In it he claims that "the White House paid a conservative black syndicated columnist and talk-show host, Mr. Armstrong Williams, $240,000 to shill on the air for the No Child Left Behind act". Notice that it wasn't the Dept. of Education that paid Williams to back the program - it was "the White House" - President Bush personally who cut the check.

U.S. Administrations in the past have used all kinds of media analysts to get across their views and programs. FDR, HST and JFK used them extensively. This time it was a conservative - and a black conservative at that! - who was paid to do what he was already doing from his own convictions. That made it EVIL!!

Mr Armstrong immediately lost all of his outlets for his opinions - being dropped by the "horrified" liberal owners of the medias in which he had been employed (a blacklist?) and has been slapped around by his sanctimonious brethern in the industry much worse than Jayson Blair ever was.

And this Mr. Young is getting paid for his opinions? I. Am. Depressed.