If it was wrong when Armstrong Williams did it for Bush/Cheney,
it isn't right when this guy does it for Obama/Biden--to the tune of over $780, 000.
And that it's been indignantly, and hypocritically, deplored by propagandists on the right doesn't make it okay, either.
For too long, liberals have reflexively defended rightist actions
by the Democrats, just because such actions have been savaged by Republicans. This impulse has
allowed the Dems to get away with doing what those very liberals screamed against when
the Republicans were doing them.
Those who thus defend the indefensible are finally just as
partisan as any fierce defender of Bush/Cheney. If we observe our moral standards only when the
Other Side offends them, then we offend them, too--or they're not really moral
standards.
MCM
Where's the Outrage
Over Obama's Health Care Propagandist, Jonathan Gruber?
US News and World
Report blogger
Peter Roff
is
comparing
the Obama
Administration's
payments to
Jonathan Gruber to
the the pundit
payola scandal of
the
Bush
Administration paying Armstrong Williams.
In January 2005, USA Today revealed that a US Department of Education contract paid Williams to promote
Bush's No Child Left
Behind legislation
on his TV show and to ask other African American journalists to do
likewise.
Democrats and
media activists were appropriately outraged at such blatant and hidden
government
propaganda.
A January 7,
2010,
report
by Marcy
Wheeler on
her
Firedoglake blog
exposed the similar failure of the Obama Administration and
influential MIT economist Jonathan Gruber to fully and consistently reveal Gruber's role
in
receiving hundreds
of thousands of dollars as a paid consultant to the Obama
Administration, while promoting Obama's health care
legislation.
Roff, a long-time Republican activist and right wing pundit, notes that in the William's payola scandal "senior Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives wrote to President George W. Bush expressing their outrage.
In one of those
letters, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Henry Waxman, George Miller,
David Obey,
and Elijah
Cummings denounced
the payments made to Williams under a government contract as
'illegal
covert
propaganda'
intended to influence the American electorate."
What a difference
partisanship makes now that Obama is president. In the Gruber scandal
prominent liberals including New York Times
columnist Paul
Krugman
have attacked the
messenger, Marcy Wheeler and Firedoglake, rather than criticizing the lack of
disclosure and the money changing hands, and digging further into the
relationship between Obama and his paid health care
advocate Jonathan
Gruber. Who else
is receiving convenient Administration funding while flacking
'independently' for Obama policies? In a democracy, we need to know
and we have a right to know, no matter which party controls the White
House.
While partisans
Democrats might chafe at how this issue provides fodder
to Fox
News, Grover Norquist and others
on the Right, in
this instance Roff's point that this should have been disclosed, or
never happened, is correct and the blame should be placed on the
administration.
Jonathan Gruber
has been a key
third party advocate for Obama's legislation and this is a classic
propaganda tactic.
Gruber is someone
trusted and pawned off on the press and public as independent, but
with a lucrative and not so transparent financial relationship to the
person whose position (in this case Obama) he is
supporting.
Gruber himself, in his finer and less
public moments, has described being a "paid consultant to the
Obama Administration." Unfortunately, that relationship was not
very visible or publicly recognized until Marcy Wheeler
blew her blogger's
whistle. She deserves praise, not derision, and this case deserves
investigation, not the back of
the hand from Dems
whose silence makes them appear quite comfortable with government
propaganda when it's
their
president.
===
John
Stauber is a
writer and activist.
