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Holy Crap! This guy used fraudulent ID to get within striking range of the President of the United States?! AND he had possession of Top Secret CIA documents?!!

Shouldn’t he be in jail? And how come Novak’s not doin’ time for his “act of treason”?

And how come liberal bloggers didn’t turn into “salivating morons who make up the lynch mob”, just like those Cap’n Crunch’s Quarters wackos, every time Brit Hume brazenly announced US soldiers had found the “smoking gun” WMDs in Iraq?

Well, I guess we can wade into the slime with this sorded tale of President Bush, the gay prostitute, and the soft balls. Yuck.

The WingNuts will lob Dan Rather and CNN at you as if they equal the Right’s Criminal MisConduct. Maybe you should post this on the Eric Simonson Post to the Right?

This entry should definitely go into the WatchBlog Blue Column Hall Of Fame! Well done, William!

I posted this over at Eric’s entry (surely to be ignored), thought it more appreciated here for the point I made:

With the resignation of Eason Jordan and the Churchill manipulation ushered out of the spotlight, the Right (and the media) finds the latest Gannon revelations staring them in the face.

As the justoneminute blog link showed, you’re in the unenviable position of having to ignore the credible questions of how such a shady character was even allowed into the White House, while having to focus on the salacious, deviant homosexual revelations you’ve indicted the Left blogsphere for using to personally destroy an already disgraced impostor.

Also, if you carefully read the more disturbing revelations from Raw Story, no direct or expressed accusations against WH spokesman Scott McClellan are made in the article. Instead, it is the hysterical and shell shocked exaggeration of a party now in crisis mode, that is responsible for spreading the charge.

Sheesh. That’s nasty.

Well, I knew from the moment he made that “divorced from reality” comment that he had to be a prositute for the neo-cons, but…
I would have never imagined he was also literally a WHORE.

AP:
“Shouldn’t he be in jail? And how come Novak’s not doin’ time for his “act of treason”?”

Like I said on Bert’s thread covering the same topic other day, if found guilty, I think Gannon should be forced to share a lifetime jail cell with the repulsive Novak - who should have already been sent up a long time ago.

What I found really hilarious and priceless is this archived copy of his “Conservative Guy” webpage (I found it on a link at Daily Kos) where Gannon defines himself and attempts to slam liberals.

Adrienne, thanks for the link - that’s the best laugh I’ve had in a while. If anyone has the stomache to look at the porn shots and “escort” ads on americablog, clean off with Adrienne’s link. Highlights from the home page of this gay hooker/”journalist”/Scott McClellan lifeline:

- he owns a Baretta 9mm and a Japanese SUV

- his mission is…”help people to allow their conservative values to govern their actions”

- his “soon to be published book” is titled “The Hypocrisy Of Liberalism”

LOL! Honestly, this whole thing could be in the Onion.

And why is it important that he owns a Baretta 9mm or Japanese SUV?

And why is any of this relevant?

You all don’t seriously believe any of what you read, do you?

It’s the story that just keeps on giving, as Keith Olbermann so aptly put it.

White House Spokesman Scott McClellan is being ‘outed’ for supposedly being gay. If true- if- it raises interesting scenarios.

First, the obvious one: did McClellan act as conduit, and provide “Jeff” with classified material on Valerie Plame? It’s already known “Jeff” was one of the ‘journalists’ investigated by the Justice Department.

Next, if it proves true about McClellan’s sexual orientation, did Bush know, and approve him to be Press Secretary anyway? I would hope so. But I would like to see Bush acknowledge it. And even more interesting, would Bush have the decency to support McClellan? The thought of Bush standing foursquare behind a gay White House spokesman would give Rove a bad case of the night screams.

Of course, if this proves true, McClellan would most likely resign.

And where, oh where is Kenneth Starr?

And why is it important that he owns a Baretta 9mm

If he wanted to be a manly conservative (and use an American measurement system), wouldn’t he own a .45? Of course that leaves your manhood open to question by some yoyo with a .50, doesn’t it. Where does it stop?

And where, oh where is Kenneth Starr?

Is he gay too?

I wish McClellan would resign. God, how I miss Ari Fleischer. Remember how he used to come out after every Bush statement and tell us, “What President Bush meant to say was…”

Now I never have any idea what Bush is talking about. Are we going to end tyranny in the world, or not? Are we going to punish tyrants, or continue supporting Musharraf? Are we fighting against bin Laden, or helping him further his agenda of toppling secular regimes and replacing them with Islamic states. Who knows.

a liberal activist and associate of Ralph Nader has been obtaining access to White House press briefings while claiming to be a legitimate news reporter.

Russell Mokhiber, who sells a $795 a year newsletter that bashes corporations, attends the briefings to make obscure anti-Bush political points. Recently, for example, he asked spokesman Scott McClellan whether President Bush violated one of the Ten Commandments by invading Iraq. Mokhiber, who told AIM that he has never taken a journalism class in his life and was denied a permanent White House press pass, posts his ludicrous questions and answers on a far-left web site under the title “Scottie & Me.”

Other Mokhiber topics have included industrial hemp, Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty, possible war crimes charges against Bush, and Halliburton.

http://www.aim.org/press_release/2643_0_19_0_C/

I will see your one CIA File and raise you several hundred FBI Files.

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1996_rpt/fbirep.htm

I am not saying that whoever leaked the CIA File should not be prosecuted they should be as fully as possible, what I really would like to know is how many on this side defended the Clinton Administration for Filegate or though Filegate was “no big deal”.

In response to “Filegate”:
http://www.youdebate.com/DEBATES/filegate.HTM

I am not aware of any information in the FBI files that would constitute a leak on the level of the exposure of a CIA agent.

As for Russell Mokhiber, are you saying that a member of the Democratic Party shepherded him into the White House Press Corp and told him what to ask President Bush? Was anyone in a position of power in the press conference charged with deliberate knowledge that Russel was a plant, and called on Russel to deliberately harass and bother the President?

Because if the Democratic Party is placing plants in the press corp, they should be held responsible.

From a good article by Frank Rich in The NY Times entitled “The White House Stages Its ‘Daily Show’”:

“How this happened is a mystery that has yet to be solved. “Jeff” has now quit Talon News not because he and it have been exposed as fakes but because of other embarrassing blogosphere revelations linking him to sites like hotmilitarystud.com and to an apparently promising career as an X-rated $200-per-hour “escort.” If Mr. Guckert, the author of Talon News exclusives like “Kerry Could Become First Gay President,” is yet another link in the boundless network of homophobic Republican closet cases, that’s not without interest. But it shouldn’t distract from the real question - that is, the real news - of how this fake newsman might be connected to a White House propaganda machine that grows curiouser by the day. Though Mr. McClellan told Editor & Publisher magazine that he didn’t know until recently that Mr. Guckert was using an alias, Bruce Bartlett, a White House veteran of the Reagan-Bush I era, wrote on the nonpartisan journalism Web site Romenesko, that “if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover.” (Otherwise, it would be a rather amazing post-9/11 security breach.)

By my count, “Jeff Gannon” is now at least the sixth “journalist” (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration’s “marriage” initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports (“In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting,” went the script) pretending to “sort through the details” of the administration’s Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such “reports,” some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal “covert propaganda” by the Government Accountability Office.

The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration’s total $250 million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.

Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the six known shills is only a small piece of the administration’s overall propaganda effort. President Bush wasn’t entirely joking when he called the notoriously meek March 6, 2003, White House press conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion “scripted” while it was still going on. (And “Jeff Gannon” apparently wasn’t even at that one). Everything is scripted.”

I encourage everyone to read the Full article (free registation to NYT required), as it has other interesting things to say about how people in the media are trying hard to avoid this story.

If you do hit the NYT, check out Maureen Dowd’s story on this also - apparently SHE was denied a press pass w/o a months-long security pass.

Tom Tomorrow’s summary: “If you’re advertising a dodgy business on the web and someone finds out about it, it doesn’t constitute “digging into your personal life”—key words here being “advertising” and “business.” Not sure what part of that the right wingers fail to comprehend. Also, discussions of whether or not prostitution should be legal are completely irrelevant, just a further attempt to sidetrack the issue. Rightly or wrongly, prostitution is illegal, and if G/G was running an escort service, that means he was publicly advertising his criminal activity, apparently while also being granted access to the White House which was denied to an established columnist for the New York Times”.

And there’s also difference bwtn “Russell Mokhiber, who sells a $795 newsletter” and Talon News which sold nothing at all.

I can’t believe there isn’t more outrage about this jeff gannon story especially since this will be the sixth known attempt of propaganda by the whitehouse. Talon news wasn’t even started when he first got access to the whitehouse.

Pitts: White House reporter or party shill? It’s not brain surgery

So where is our outrage?
Frankly, the only thing more galling than the brazenness with which the White House abrogates the public’s right to know is the sheep-like docility with which we accept it, with which we become complicit in our own hoodwinking.
When the history of this era is written, people will wonder why we didn’t challenge its excesses, why we didn’t know the things we should have.
If you’re still around, remember the uproar you do not hear right this moment and tell them the truth.
Ignorance was easier.

Okay, I have to say I kind of buy into some of Kirk’s arguments. And on a side note, I’d also like to say that while I think that Filegate was the result of poor planning rather than evil intent, we still shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is certainly troubling to James Baker that his personal FBI file was viewed by underlings because of incompetent handling. However, I don’t think any lasting harm came to the individuals whose files were exposed. Still, people should be responsible for goofing up.

As for the Russel Mokhiber comment, I’ve continued to think about it. And I came across this article:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000798573

I believe in the veracity of the reporters who are quoted, and so I believe that there are probably a lot of partisan individuals who are asking stupid questions at White House press conferences.

So, I don’t think this sort of behaviour is “egregious” given the moral standards prevelant now.

However, the fact that reporting has degraded to a point where the White House press room is riddled with people asking stupid questions is sad and depressing. But I don’t know if the 1920s was really any better.

What I do know is that we should get angry with Russel Mokhibiter when he asks stupid questions (although if you look at his record, he has a lot of good work behind him too), and get angry with the GOP when they install plants in the press corp.

The only big issues that I see with Jeff Gannon is whether or not he was truly a plant (and given specific questions to ask), and if he was given access to the Valerie Plame information.

All of this, I think, is far less important than why Robert Novak is not being held accountable for the Valerie Plame incident, while other reporters are.

Julia