OLD DOGG'S NEW TRICKS AREN'T FOOLING ALL RAPPER'S CHECKERED LIFE MAKES HIM POOR CHOICE FOR ADVERTISERS.

Byline: Paul D. White Local View

THE growing corporate interest in marketing rapper Snoop Dogg by companies like T-Mobil and children's toy manufacturers reveals America's grossly mutated social conscience. It marks a dangerously unobserved low in the decline of our national values and integrity.

It seems both innocent and quite typical on the surface: a popular, charismatic entertainer with a bad-boy cachet is tapped to shill products for a variety of corporate sponsors. If only it were that harmless.

Calvin Broadus is a 33-year-old convicted felon, who proudly continues to promote his present affiliation with the Los Angeles-based Crips gang in his newest musical release ``Drop It Like It's Hot.'' (``I'm a gangsta, but y'all knew that ... I keep a blue flag hanging out my backside, but only on the left side, yeah that's the Crip side.'')

Harmless teenage posturing about trying to act tough? Hardly.

This drug-abusing hood (in a Rolling Stone interview he bragged about smoking up to almost two pounds of marijuana a week) flaunts his membership in a gang responsible worldwide for thousands of murders, thousands of injuries to innocent people and tens of thousands of hopelessly hooked drug addicts. The Crips members have terrorized neighborhoods and schools and encouraged a culture that worsens the already deplorable social statistics for America's young black men. And while gangs continue to be America's worst crime problem, corporate sponsors wait in line to have their products hawked by Snoop Dogg, currently the most brazen purveyor of this deadly gang lifestyle.

On one of his many Web sites, Snoop Dogg brags about ``blurring the line between reality and fiction,'' and that appears to be the problem afflicting his corporate sponsors and the public who buy their products. Why would Fox, Paramount and Columbia studios allegedly engage in a recent bidding war to pay Snoop more than $1 million for the story of how this promiscuous criminal and drug abuser is a wonderful role model to the Pop Warner football team he coaches for his young son?

The companies using his image either don't know or don't care how incredibly inappropriate this relationship is. What's next, using images of former mafioso John Gotti to sell suits? Or a workout video starring members of various white-power skinhead groups? With his good head of hair, surely some company could ink a deal with Scott Peterson to promote hair-care products.

More puzzling, however, than a few bonehead companies and celebrities is the silence and lack of censure from so many other sectors.

Most notable is the silence from Crips founder and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Tookie Williams. If Williams is as sincerely anti-gang and pro-children as his books proclaim, why the hesitancy to publicly denounce both Snoop Dogg and his sponsors?

Where is all the Hollywood crowd who spoke out so self-righteously against President Bush and the War on Terror abroad, but lack the moral courage to risk their public image by denouncing the very ``cool'' Snoop, whose far more dangerous domestic terror is being promoted right on their doorstep?

As I watch celebrities like Paris Hilton, Burt Reynolds and Wayne Newton enjoy a good laugh with gangster Snoop Dogg in the latest T-Mobil ad, it's obvious they haven't had the experience, like I unfortunately have, of holding a dead child who's been shot by the same kind of gangs that Snoop Dogg belongs to and, by his growing fame, encourages other children to participate in.

This historical step downward in America's values illustrated by using a currently active criminal to proudly promote consumer products is being allowed to happen for the same reason a frog will stay in a slowly warming pan of water until it boils itself alive: It's gradual.

As we increasingly trade principle and substance for celebrity and style, Snoop Dogg's corporate promotional gigs are just the latest step in our national downturn of integrity - our willingness to exchange every moral value we have, for the promise of a little money, fame or both. Sadly, no one even notices anymore.