"Today Warner Bros. is releasing Cher's long-awaited new album, "Living Proof," but that's not why the 55-year-old pop diva called us last Friday. Not at all.

"I don't even want to talk about the album," Cher told us curtly. "If I'd thought you were going to mention the album, I wouldn't have called you."

So what has Cher seething? Nothing less than the Justice Department's decision last month to throw heavy blue curtains over the bare-breasted 12 1/2-foot cast aluminum statue "Spirit of Justice" and her skimpily togaed male partner, "Majesty of Law," which have stood in the department's Great Hall since 1936.

"These statues have been there through other very conservative administrations, and no one has seen fit to put a curtain in front of them," Cher said. "What are we going to do next? Put shorts on the statue of David, put an 1880s bathing suit on `Venus Rising' and a shirt on the Venus de Milo? If they start doing that, maybe they'll start deciding what books are all right for us to read, and we'll start losing all of our freedoms. This really is unbelievable. It's shocking."

Cher added: "I'm not the bastion of good taste. No one knows that better than I."

But she doesn't buy Justice's argument that the sculpturescreated by Prix de Rome winner C. Paul Jennewein-are a visual distraction during Attorney General John Ashcroft's news conferences and terrorism alerts. "If he doesn't want to make speeches in front of them, let him make speeches somewhere else," she scoffed. "He's mobile."

Cher was also dismissive of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman's move to cover up murals at her agency's headquarters that depict American Indians scalping white people, including naked women. "I didn't know that art was politically correct," said Cher, who is part Cherokee.

Meanwhile, she told us she's planning her farewell tour, after which she'll leave the concert stage and concentrate on acting. "I can't really complain, my life is so good," she said, adding that she's been too busy touring and recording to focus on her love life. "There's nobody special that I date-nobody I want to bring home." She rebuffed our offer to help her find companionship. "I usually find that on my own."" (Lloyd Grove, The Washington Post, February 26, 2002)