Dick Prince has a synopsis of Armstrong Williams’ transgression, and he also provides a pretty wide survey of the slams Williams has received.
Yes, Armstrong is a clown. Anyone who doesn’t see that off-top is a fool. But on this one, I think he’s more of a clownish fox than just a clown.
Think about it…

(What follows starts with the assumption that Williams has not been contractually on the take for everything he’s said in his public career).
So, Bush’s boys pay Armstrong $240,000 (yes, a quarter mil) to pub the No Child Left Behind Act on his show and to have him do an interview with Education Secretary Rod Paige. That this is a lapse in journalistic ethics is obvious, so there’s really no need to go deeper into that.
Instead, let’s look at this on a street level. Armstrong is a hustler, and I don’t say that negatively. He’s a hustler, I’m a hustler, and you’re a hustler. So says Jimmy Baldwin, and I tend to believe everything Jimmy said when he was sober. In The Fire Next Time, the book that got me started in this writing game, Baldwin talked about his time as a child preachin’ prodigy and how being a preacher gave him a niche in the neighborhood. That niche was his hustle, the way he separated himself from the pack and gave himself an identity to folks walking on the street. We’ve all got hustles, pimpin’. Most of us don’t even know what our hustles are, but cats on TV are there because of their hustles. When you see a guy like Williams, you know what you’re going to get. You know you’re going to get whatever rhetoric the right has to bring, and it frequently comes short of nuance. If the right is with it, so is Williams. Similarly, when you read what Paul Krugman writes in the Times, you know you’re going to get cynicism about the Bush administration. That’s his hustle (at least in print; in economics, his hustle is something called monopolistic competition in trade).
So, considering that Williams’ hustle is siding with the right no matter what, why in the world would someone pay him to do what he’d do on his own? Paying Armstrong Williams to kiss the administration’s collective ass is like paying me to breathe. Why put money on that? Why pay me to do what I have to do to stay alive?
Implicitly, Williams is on the take everytime he puts his fingers on a keyboard or his mouth near a microphone. His hustle is being a black conservative. His identity and financial viability are dependent upon his allegiance to the write. That quarter mil he was paid by the Department of Education is nothing, really. All the loot he makes, whether it be the twenty grand he charges for speeches or whatever he got from his syndicators for his column, depends on his willingness to cosign on the Republican agenda.
So why would Bush and Co. pay him? How could they not realize he’d do what they wanted to without having to chip him the loot?
Williams should get some props for what he’s pulled off. He made a killing for something he would have done anyway. I’m not even mad at him for this. I’m irate with what he does without prodding, with the way he has subjugated his dignity for decades to get to where he is. I hate that he has snuggled up next to Strom Thurmond, Ronald Reagan, Clarence Thomas, and others that hate black people to make himself rich. That’s what should be hated. This money he got this time is nothing, man. He’s been on the take since day one. As a journalist, this explicit compromise throws up flags, but it’s so much deeper than that.
Cooning has been profitable since the dawn of time, but it’s not profitable on an ad hoc basis. It’s profitable as a career, as a way of life. This one sin ain’t shit. Armstrong Williams gets props from me for strong-arming Bush, somehow figuring out how to get paid for something that, to him, is no work at all. That’s pimpin’ folks, and from here, it looks pretty easy.
Except for sleeping at night…