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Love for Sale
By
MAUREEN DOWD

I'm herewith resigning as a member of the liberal media elite.

I'm joining up with the conservative media elite. They get paid better.

First comes news that Armstrong Williams got $240,000 from the Education
Department to plug the No Child Left Behind Act.

The families of soldiers killed in Iraq get a paltry $12,000. But good
publicity? Priceless.

Mr. Williams helped out the first President Bush and Clarence Thomas during
the Anita Hill scandal. Mr. Williams, who served as Mr. Thomas's personal
assistant
at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when the future Supreme Court
justice was gutting policies that would help blacks, gleefully attacked
Professor
Hill, saying, "Sister has emotional problems," and telling The Wall Street
Journal "there is a thin line between her sanity and insanity."

Now we learn from the media reporter Howard Kurtz that the syndicated
columnist Maggie Gallagher had a $21,500 contract from the Health and Human
Services
Department to work on material promoting the agency's $300 million
initiative to encourage marriage. Ms. Gallagher earned her money, even
praising Mr.
Bush in print as a "genius" at playing "daddy" to the nation. "Mommies feel
your pain," she wrote in 2002. "Daddies give you confidence that you can
ignore
the pain and get on with life."

Genius? Not so much. Spendthrift? Definitely. W.'s administration was
running up his astounding deficit paying "journalists" to do what they would
be happy
to do for free - just to be friends with benefits, getting access that
tougher scribes are denied. Consider Charles Krauthammer, who went to the
White
House on Jan. 10 for what The Washington Post termed a "consultation" on the
inaugural speech and then praised the Jan. 20th address on Fox News as
"revolutionary,"
says Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group.

I still have many Christmas bills to pay. So I'd like to send a message to
the administration: THIS SPACE AVAILABLE.

I could write about the strong dollar and the shrinking deficit. Or defend
Torture Boy, I mean, the esteemed and sage Alberto Gonzales. Or remind
readers
of the terrific job Condi Rice did coordinating national security before
9/11 - who could have interpreted a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to
Attack
Inside the United States" as a credible threat? - not to mention her
indefatigable energy obscuring information that undercut the vice
president's dementia
on Iraq.

My preference is to get a contract with Rummy. It would be cost effective,
compared with the $80 billion he needs to train more Iraqi security forces
to
be blown up. For half a mil, I could write a doozy of a column promoting
Rummy's phantasmagoric policies.

What is all this hand-wringing about the 31 marines who died in a helicopter
crash in Iraq yesterday? It's only slightly more than the number of people
who died in traffic accidents in California last Memorial Day. The president
set the right tone, avoiding pathos when asked about the crash. "Obviously,"
he said, "any time we lose life it is a sad moment."

Who can blame Rummy for carrying out torture policies? We're in an
information age. Information is power. If people are not giving you the
intelligence
you want, you must customize to get the intelligence you want to hear.

That's why Rummy also had to twist U.S. laws to secretly form his own C.I.A.
A Pentagon memo said Rummy's recruited agents could include "notorious
figures,"
whose ties to the U.S. would be embarrassing if revealed, according to The
Washington Post. Why shouldn't a notorious figure like Rummy recruit
notorious
figures?

I could write a column denouncing John McCain for trying to call hearings
into Rummy's new spy unit, suggesting the senator is just jealous because
Rummy's
sexy enough to play James Bond.

The president might need my help as well. He looked out of it yesterday when
asked why his foreign policy is so drastically different from the one laid
out in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000 by Ms. Rice - a preview that did not
emphasize promoting democracy and liberty around the world. "I didn't read
the article," Mr. Bush said.

And why should he? Robert McNamara never read the Pentagon Papers. Why
should W. have to bone up on his own foreign policy?

Freedom means the freedom to be free from reading what you promise voters
and other stuff. I could make that case, if the price were right.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com