I'm not shocked that George W. Bush has governed as a liberal. I am shocked that conservatives have generally looked the other way. How did this happen? Well, I found perhaps a partial explanation in this weekend's headlines.

USA Today exposed Armstrong Williams as a pundit on the take on Friday. The administration paid the syndicated columnist and television host nearly a quarter-million dollars to shill for the No Child Left Behind Act after it had become law. While liberals still defend that hack I.F. Stone for demanding payment from the Soviet Union to slant his articles--Stone infamously claimed South Korea invaded North Korea to launch the Korean War--I'm glad to see that they've finally found religion and are all over Mr. Williams for his clear conflict of interest.

If this had been done on Bill Clinton's watch, conservatives would be all over him too. Because it has happened on the spendthrift George W. Bush's watch, wait for the excuses to fly and for Williams, rather than Bush and his outgoing education secretary, to be the villain of the story. Some principled conservatives have criticized the administration over this crooked use of money. Good, but I'd like to know if any other conservatives are being bribed to promote liberal positions. And if so, I'd like to run their paymasters out of town.

It's interesting that the minor scandal has become the major scandal and the major scandal has become the minor one. It's good that repercussions have found Mr. Williams. Tribune Media Services has canceled syndication of his column. But what about the Department of Education? They spent the taxpayers' money on propaganda. This is about as clear a misuse of government dollars as it gets. Williams deserves our scorn, but not as much as the people who paid him deserve it.

In 1996, the Republican Party formally called for the abolition of the Department of Education. Today, they brag of presiding over the greatest increase in the federal education bureaucracy since its establishment under Jimmy Carter. Armstrong Williams' pricetag was $241,000. Most pundits come a lot cheaper. The pricetag for conservatives shutting-up about Bush's amnesty plan for illegal aliens, signing McCain-Feingold after labeling it "unconstitutional," engaging in nation-building after mocking the practice in 2000, and increasing the size of the federal budget by a third, seems to read: "no charge." Or are other talking-heads receiving government subsidy too?

"We are at war," Armstrong Williams wrote in a 2003 column on government waste. "We need to demand that our legislators stop raiding the treasury to line their own coffers." This goes for bureaucrats and media flaks too.

It sure makes you wonder who else is getting paid.

Seems like Nader is right once again. No matter what people paint him as, he seems to step up and offer the tacit, "I told you so" time and time again. Conservatives have been frustrated many times by the Bush administration or "corporation" if you will but anyway, it seems like money is still hurting our great country and while we shun the unconstitutional McCain/Feingold bill, we hate the power of money in our political system, or at least in this case. It seems like we wield a political double-edged sword today. What in the heck do we do with this liberty of a free market in a capitalistic country where you can make a buck but critizize each and every malfeacence involving money in politics? Could this be an irrelevant post from someone who is missing the point or do we need to do something here? Many still feel that we are a two-party nation. Some feel differently. I think that to make a change we need an alternative to the corporate two-party system we have. Any thoughts?

Eagle: Pork is a huge problem. The government spends all kinds of money on all kinds of crap, and this creates large segments of the population that are in essence paid by the government.

But this doesn't mean that "Nader is right." Wouldn't the problem be solved if the federal government was limited to its constitutionally enumerated powers?

Short: I agree, but I wonder how many more administrations of politics over principle we can take? Addressing wasteful spending is the real solution, not toying with the constitution and the federal government like people on both sides seem to do. Perhaps no third party candidate can make a difference maybe only the Republican party lead us in the right direction. I don't know as I am still learning and watching the political process. We just have to keep our eyes on this administration and see what happens.

It's always seemed a little off to me when conservatives see the solution as "limiting the federal government to its constitutionally enumerated powers." We did limit the government, with a constitution. That's what constitutional government is. What we should be recognizing is that the constitution failed to limit anything. As Daschle would say, it's a 'miserable failure'. If we look back to many of the criticisms the anti-federalists had we'll see that they were astoundingly correct. The only natural solution is to chuck a non-functioning constitution and make a new one keeping the mistakes of the old in mind. Yes, it's far fetched, but it's more grounded in reality than saying everything would be ok if we just limited ourselves to the constitution.

Spot on about the real problem being lobbying by government. This ought to be recognized as a violation of the fundamental principle of republicanism: that the people are the master and government the slave. Instead of serving the electorate's understanding of right and wrong, the government is trying to become the master, telling the people how they should think. Ideally, government funded lobbying should be barred by the wrongly neglected constitutional guarantee of a republican form of government. Click on my link for more.

My dear Short,
"Pork is a huge problem." (?) For whom? Certainly not th R.s who understand better than the D.s that it all becomes part of the ballooning debt.... For which they certainly will never be responsible.

Love, as ever, Guido

My dear Guido: I didn't mean a problem for the dems or for the reps. I meant, for the abililty of our overnment to serve the real political common good of us all.

Love,
Short