Telling Account of NCLB
Yesterday’s news carried just the latest incident causing Republicans everywhere to slap the foreheads in frustration over the Bush Administration: “The Education Department paid commentator Armstrong Williams $241,000 to help promote President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law on the air, an arrangement that Williams acknowledged yesterday involved ‘bad judgment’ on his part.”
Where to begin? The continued existence of the DoEd? The stupidity of the Administration for thinking this was a good idea? The illegality of the scheme? All are valid points to get angry over, but I think the most telling thing about this is that the only way Bush can get someone to champion NCLB is to pay them a rather large sum of money. The Act is that bad.
And perhaps I’m too optimistic that this will have a chilling effect on the rest of the cheerleading punditry. It seems that commentators who get too close to the WH get burned.
4 Responses to “Telling Account of NCLB”
Please keep in mind, when you’re thinking about whether to blame this on the DOEducation, this is not the first issue the Administration has been caught doing this on. They were also reprimanded for doing the exact same thing to promote their Medicare package. (They also funneled the money through the same company, btw).
This is not to say that it is only the Bush administration who has done this – the Clintons did something like this with one of their programs back in the late 90’s, and were not reprimanded on it at the time – for the reason that “no one brought it to the attention” of the watchdogs who are supposed to watch out for this sort of fraud.
NCLB isn’t as bad as its absence. It is not a large amount of money, a target audience was sought…an audience who could profit greatly by using the NCLB escape clauses from public schools that disserve minorities such as Cleveland, Indianapolis, Washington, DC, NYC, Chicago, and the list goes on nearly forever.
As far as the ethics of it go I thought we were all on CBS ethics in the journalism profession. Its not like Mr. Williams took money for telling bald face liberal serving lies, or, covered it up, and is still covering it up with very little noticed from the so-called watchdogs referred to.
Anonymous, I am sure you were likely one of the many conservatives that basked in Bush’s election, ending the era of Clinton and his ethical lapses.
Here we have an ethical lapse by Bush, and your defense is to bring up Dan Rather?? That, taken with your party’s leaders’ attempt to soften ethics rules, shows that power has already begun to corrupt.
Looks like Mr. Williams has more skeletons in his closet than he knows what to do with.
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=536