The picture seems appropriate, given that payola is what it's about nowadays, whether it is the Bushist Education Department or the Post Baathist Allawi Administration. What better way to show that than with an album cover starring your favorite crooner and mine, Saddam Hussein?
In a startling development, and just like the practice in the old Baathist Party days, the Allawi government has begun to pay cash to reporters in order to get them to cover stories. I'm sure they thought such practice typical Baathist corruption, at least until they noticed the arrangement between the Bushist Party and reporters such as Armstrong Williams.
Apologists for the Bushists, including Williams, by the way, have said that he supported NCLB all along. The truth is coming out that he in fact changed his opinion on the issue after he got paid by the Bushist Party. There's a bit of an integrity deficit there, and engineers are working round the clock to try to figure out how to bridge it. In comments on the Armstrong Williams scandal, Scott McClellan of the White House appears to be getting ready to throw the African American columnist under the bus (likely the back of said vehicle).
But back to Allawi once more. . .
After a meeting held by Mr Allawi's campaign alliance in west Baghdad, reporters, most of whom were from the Arabic-language press, were invited upstairs where each was offered a "gift" of a $100 bill contained in an envelope.
Many of the journalists accepted the cash - about equivalent to half the starting monthly salary for a reporter at an Iraqi newspaper - and one jokingly recalled how Saddam Hussein's regime had also lavished perks on favoured reporters.
Giving gifts to journalists is common in many of the Middle East's authoritarian regimes, although reporters at the conference said the practice was not yet widespread in postwar Iraq.
All progress in spreading Democracy across the globe at the barrell of a gun or via a crisp $100 bill. Hooray for us!
Take two aspirin, a couple swallows of whiskey, and rinse. Then spit. Then rinse again. Maybe you'll get the taste out of your mouth, but I'm not guaranteeing anything.
