It should be obvious now that the two syndicated right-wing columnists exposed as paid shills for the Bush administration are really just the tip of a grimy iceberg.

With the admission by Armstrong Williams that he had pocketed a cool $240,000 from the "Education" Department to pimp in his columns for the Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program, and by Maggie Gallagher that she'd taken $21,500 from Health and Human Services to pimp for Bush's "support for marriage" initiative (sexism is alive and well in the Bush White House when it comes to bribes), comes word that the administration spent a whopping $88 million in 2004 on PR for its various schemes, up 33% over last year.

That's our money.

The likelihood is that there's plenty more tainted cash that went to shameless hacks like Williams and Gallagher, though.

The irony in all this is that so much of the corporate media these days is pimping for Bush anyway. Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR) has documented how ABC and NBC have skewed their coverage of the alleged Social Security "crisis" by implying that the bankruptcy predicted by Bush is a universally accepted reality, when it fact it is only a scare and wildly improbable scenario.

The coverage of the war in Iraq, which is going from bad to worse but which keeps getting positive coverage on all the networks and in the press, with wounded and killed Americans and U.S.-brutalized Iraqis kept carefully and deliberately out of view, could have been scripted at the White House.

Of course, maybe there are key players in all the editorial offices of these institutions, steering their coverage in a pro-Bush direction in return for some under-the-table cash, but this seems unlikely. More probably, the media are behaving like administration PR outfits because it's easy, it's safe, and it's cheap--and because shilling wins valuable points that can be cashed in during regulatory issues, as when newspapers seek permission to buy a TV station in their own circulation area.

Still, there is something almost smutty about well-fed people like Williams and Gallagher taking money in return for writing positive stories for the president. There should be some kind of intellectual STD that you contract for performing that kind of obscene act--something that causes warts to appear on the eyelids and the tips of the fingers or something.

Gallagher said she would have told her readers about her check, but she "didn’t remember."

Personally, I'd have a hard time in my income bracket "forgetting" a check for $21,500. I suspect that that is the case for most hard-working scribes, though maybe not for the coiffed airheads that grace the little screen, or for the people whose faces appear in thumbnails next to their verbiage on editorial pages across the nation. (I wonder if she "forgot" to include it on her income tax return...)

Bush has called on his cabinet officers not to buy good press, though he has not called on them to come clean and report on the good press they've no doubt already bought. This is a bit like his telling the military not to torture after first authorizing a program of torture.

You can almost see the wink as he says it.

What this saga says about the Bush administration is that it knows it's pulling a fast one on the American public--on taxes, on the war, on Social Security, on education "reform," on health care. You name it. Bush and his gang have so little confidence in the inherent merits of their programs and plans that they have to pay people in the media to give them the proper propagandistic spin.

For the rest of this column, please go (at no charge) to This Can't Be Happening! .