dailykos.com
americablog.blogspot.com
onegoodmove.org
Go to these sites. Spend some time on each one. Read the comments under each heading. There’s a boatload of info out there on this Jeff/Jim Gannon/Guckert and there’s more almost every hour. A lot of people out there are doing some really good research and analysis about this man and his relationship to the White House.
Send the links around to people who care. This is huge.
What issue is that supposed to be? That Helen Thomas can savage a Republican president with inane and patently partisan questions and that a non-Dem reporter is excoriated for being just a little bit more evenhanded?
Read more than Markos The Village Idiot, is my suggestion:
The Insanity of the American Left
I can’t count the number of emails we’ve gotten from Democrats on the Jeff Gannon “story.” For the most part, they drip with venom and irrational hatred. I’d like to believe that there is some kind of a respectable left in this country, but where is it? It sure isn’t showing up in our email inbox.
This missive, which came in this morning, is typical: I guess you “holier-than-thou moral values conservatives” don’t have a problem with gay male prostitutes who pose as conservative reporters as long as they are republican, huh? Hypocrites. If there is a god, you hypocrites are all going to hell. (I don’t think God will forgive you, even if you ARE republican.)
The stupidity of these people, as well as their malice, is mind-boggling. Can anyone discern what this guy, and the dozens if not hundreds of Democrats who have sent more or less identical emails, are talking about? Why are liberals obsessed with the fact that Jeff Gannon was once a gay escort? Beats me. Why does this character think that as conservatives, we are duty-bound to hate gay escorts? Beats me. We’ve done close to 10,000 posts on this site, and I doubt that we’ve ever mentioned gay escorts one way or another. Would I want my son to be one? No. Do I think that having once been a gay escort should disqualify Jeff Gannon from becoming a reporter, or entering any other occupation? No. Why do liberals find this so hard to understand? And how on God’s green earth does this make us “hypocrites”?
Of course, what we’ve criticized the left-wing blogs for is posting nude photographs of Gannon. How does the twisted “logic” manifested by these emailers justify that contemptible practice? Once again: beats me. The only conclusion I can come to is that a great many liberals are so consumed by hate that they have gone stark raving mad.
UPDATE: The meltdown continues. Here is the latest from our email inbox: Jeff Gannon and Karl Rove are secretly lovers! I’m not making this up; not only have we heard about this theory via hate mail from lefties, a reader (a sane one, that is) also says this is popping up all over AOL’s political discussion sites. It’s just about time for the men in white coats to intervene, I think.
Have They No Shame? No, Actually, They Don’t
The American left has been guilty of many contemptible actions over the past twenty years, but few are so deeply offensive as its treatment of Jim Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon (His real name is Guckert, but he adopted Gannon as a pen name). Gannon is, apparently, a homosexual with a rather sordid past, including stints working as a gay escort. He is now trying to make a career for himself as a reporter; until a week or two ago, he worked for the online Talon News Service. He was able to get one-day-at-a-time passes to attend White House press briefings, where he committed the unpardonable sin of asking questions that had a pro-Bush administration twist. (Sort of like Helen Thomas, only in reverse, and nowhere near as one-sided.)
The presence of a Bush-friendly journalist in the White House press corps was taken by the left as a deep affront. A study conducted a few years ago found that the White House press corps is 90% Democratic; apparently the left won’t be satisfied until the figure is 100%. So liberals began “investigating” Gannon. They found that he was a homosexual and started posting photos of him on their web sites, along with vicious personal attacks. Gannon, stunned by the virulence of the left’s attack on him, quit his job at Talon. Subsequently, a low-life named John Aravosis who is a gay activist and has a web site, found nude photos of Gannon and posted them online.
Ever since this “story” broke, we have been inundated by emails from leftists demanding to know why we aren’t covering it. Actually, we have done a single post on the controversy, which explained why we don’t think there is any story there. The claims against Gannon are:
He isn’t a “real” journalist. News for the left: you don’t have to take a test. He was working as a reporter until you drove him out of the business.
He was a Bush administration plant. There is, of course, no evidence for this whatsoever. And don’t you think that if the administration decided to “plant” a journalist to ask friendly questions, they could come up with someone with a bit more distinguished pedigree? The real issue here is that Democrats believe that Democratic press secretaries should be asked friendly questions, and Republican press secretaries should be asked unfriendly questions.
He had something–God knows what–to do with the Valerie Plame story. Again, no one has ventured a coherent explanation of this theory, let alone bothered to hint at what the evidence for it might be. Given that Ms. Plame was last seen posing for Vanity Fair in a “spy” outfit, I don’t think we’re on the trail of an espionage breakthrough here. And wasn’t it supposed to be Karl Rove who tipped off Bob Novak?
The bottom line is that there isn’t any story here, other than the bottomless depravity of liberals in America. How any of their purported “grievances” against Gannon justifies posting nude photos of him is inexplicable.
Yesterday I filmed a “Reliable Sources” segment with Howard Kurtz that will air on CNN tomorrow morning. One of the other guests was the above-mentioned Mr. Aravosis. He is obviously a man for whom the concept of shame has no meaning; I was embarrassed to be on the same program with him. Today, Kurtz writes about the Gannon affair in the Washington Post. Kurtz got an interview with Gannon, who has been keeping out of sight since he was driven out of journalism by the left. Gannon turns out to be pretty eloquent: Jeff Gannon, the former White House reporter whose naked pictures have appeared on a number of gay escort sites, says that he has “regrets” about his past but that White House officials knew nothing about his salacious activities.
“I’ve made mistakes in my past,” he said yesterday. “Does my past mean I can’t have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?”
Gannon chastised his critics, breaking a silence that began last week when liberal bloggers disclosed his real name, James Dale Guckert, and a Web page, which he paid for, featuring X-rated photos of himself. “Why would they be looking into a person’s sexual history? Is that what we’re going to do to reporters now? Is there some kind of litmus test for reporters? Is it right to hold someone’s sexuality against them?”
Dismissing speculation that he had a permanent White House press pass, which requires a full-blown FBI background check that usually takes months, Gannon said he could not get one because he was required to first get a pass from the Senate press gallery, which did not consider him to be working for a legitimate news organization. Instead, he said he was admitted on a day-to-day basis after supplying his real name, date of birth and Social Security number. He said he did not use a pseudonym to hide his past but because his real last name is hard to spell and pronounce.
Aravosis is quoted, too, and he makes no sense: John Aravosis, a gay activist who posted the pictures of Gannon on his Americablog.org, said the issue is not Gannon’s right to be a journalist but his “White House access. . . . The White House wouldn’t let him in the door right now, knowing of his background.”
Aravosis said Gannon is guilty of “what I call family-values hypocrisy. Basically, he’s asking the gay community to protect him when he attacks us.”
That is really one of the stupidest things I’ve read in a long time. Just try to parse Aravosis’s logic: The issue is Gannon’s White House access. But why is that an issue? There was nothing special about Gannon’s access, he got it the same way as everyone else. His “access” is an issue, according to Aravosis, because “the White House wouldn’t let him in the door right now, knowing of his background.” Huh? That is one of the most stunning non sequiturs ever. First of all, what is the evidence for the proposition that the White House would deny access to a reporter who was once a gay escort? The proposition is absurd on its face; it wasn’t the White House that drove Gannon out of his job, it was Aravosis and his friends. Second, even if that claim were true, so what?? How on earth would the White House’s attitude twoard gay escorts justify Aravosis in posting nude pictures of Gannon?
Aravosis claims further that Gannon is guilty of “hypocrisy,” an all-purpose charge that generally turns out to mean little or nothing. The “hypocrisy” in this case supposedly arises from “asking the gay community to protect him when he attacks us.” This is another stunningly stupid statement. Every word in it is false. Gannon, first of all, never attacked the gay community; the gay community, in the person of Aravosis and others, attacked him. Neither did Gannon ask the gay community to protect him; Aravosis just made that up. On the contrary, the only reason Gannon needed protection is because he came under a vicious, unprovoked, personal attack from low-lifes with web sites, pre-eminently Aravosis, Kos and Atrios.
There is, I guess, a story here. But it has nothing to do with Jeff Gannon, a poor guy who thought he could put his past behind him and pursue a career as a reporter. No, the story has to do with the depth to which the Democratic Party and the American left have fallen. Desperate to change the subject in the wake of the Eason Jordan debacle, they seized on poor Mr. Gannon, made silly, baseless accusations against him, denounced him for being a homosexual, and, in the ultimate indignity, tracked down and published nude photographs of him. All to distract attention from Jordan, and to punish Mr. Gannon for the “sin” of being a Republican. Rarely have I seen such deeply contemptible conduct.
I read the posts at Democratic Underground and The Daily Kos. Most of 'em are of the variety quoted in the two articles above. God, the next 4 years are going to be great 
Tony
C’mon Kahuna. This guy was the Washington Bureau Chief for Talon News, which is a very conservative organization associated with the website GOPUSA (this according to Fox News). He asked the President how he planned to work with “people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.” That doesn’t sound like objective journalism to me. He was given press credentials for the White House, even though he had been denied credentials for the Hill. Now, I’m no Helen Thomas fan by any means, but given the administration’s iffy past with the media (paying people to endorse their policies, etc,…), you have to wonder how this guy got clearance. You know as well as I do how hard it is to get security clearance for anything, much less to sit in the room with the President. There are a lot of unanswered qustions about how this guy got information he reported, how he got into the White House at all, and what his relationship was with several key Republicans, including McClellan. I don’t know if any of it will amount to much, but it isn’t unreasonable to ask the questions.
Sorry, but this alleged reporter who had two years access to Bush press conferences is an enormous joke. They only let him in because he wrote glowing pro-White House stuff. And the admin. kicked out and/or barred others because of their anti-Bush sympathies. There’s no other explanation. Go figure. But then again presidential press conferences are jokes, have been for years and never tell us any new information anyway.
“How any of their purported “grievances” against Gannon justifies posting nude photos of him is inexplicable.”
That’s RIDICULOUS!
Mister Kahuna: Gannon/Guckert posted nude photos of HIMSELF in an effort to solicit business for his escort service. No trickery there whatsover. That was public info.
This issie is important because someone pulled some strings in the white house to get this man in. Had you read any of the links you’d see that lots of people are folllowing the money that supported Guckert/Gannon and that allowed him access to a white house that should have much better screening for individuals allowed into the white house. This will only get bigger.
Guckert/gannon wrote some of the most homophobic nasty peices got Talon that you’ll ever read while working on the side as a gay prostitute. That is just disgusting, self-hating and wrong. Put that is not the focus of this issue. It reallly is about money and access. Just imagine if this had happened with a democrat in the white house. Somebody is going to fall from high on up the pole of republicans, just watch.
Flame away.
What would have been the left’s reaction if a gay reporter was banned from the White House by a Republican administration?
Brett
That’s not the issue. The issue is he had no qualifications, no professional journalism experience, no earnings from what meager journalsm experinece he did have (which is required by the SS to even get considered for a press pass) AND he was given access to CIA papers, and somehow had prior knowledge of the invasion of Iraq. The issue is: how did he gain such intimate access to the white house? In this post 9.11 world how does an a “journalist” who’d previously only written for his high school paper and taken a 50 dollar journalism course get access to the president? As I said before, it’s not a gay issue, or even a prostitute issue–the issue is ACCESS and who provided it to him and why. Period.
"What would have been the left’s reaction if a gay reporter was banned from the White House by a Republican administration? "
What are you talking about? This isn’t a matter of him being kept out of the White House because he was gay. It’s a matter of him not being properly cleared to sit 20 feet from the President. It’s about allowing a “reporter” into the White House press corps that is so far from objective as to be a punchline with actual journalists. It’s about allowing someone to report on White House events who simultaneously excoriates the gay community and acts as a gay prostitute (allegedly). It’s about this obviously one sided reporter also getting access to classified information and special favors from administration officials specifically because of his favorable reporting.
You can’t just dismiss the problem by trying to twist it into some sort of gay vs straight issue.
Exactly, Slowguy.
Totally agree w/ you there. Apart from the fact that an alleged former gay porn actor who’s trying to keep those facts on the down and low is obviously a huge security risk.
I can’t believe people fail to see a problem with this on so many levels. The guy had access to the POTUS without going through a full security clearance screening by the proper authorities. Hello!?
What’s particularly disappointing is that this guy is a walking invalidation of the journalisitic profession and not one major news magazine has touched this even though it has all the juicy tidbits of television magazine stories: sex, corruption, influence peddling, etc. This guy calling himself (and Scott McClellan calling him) a journalist is like a jack hammer operator calling himself a brain surgeon.
Anyone that thinks the media is liberal need only look at the limited coverage of this story to see otherwise.
This is obviously significantly worse than a major new outlet that ran story after story about a Presidential candidate that had been supplied by an activist from another party and that was based upon documents that were so obviously forged that the network could not find a single expert to verify them.
This is much worse than a major cable network not reporting about atrocities in a totalitarian regime to avoid losing access to the “stories” from that regime. Much worse than the same network running stories
Much worse than a so called paper of record knowingly saying that a famine engineered by another totalitarian regime was not happening and then continuing to brag about the Pulitzer Prize based upon that so called reporting when their fraud was revealed.
Much worse than a major network having a reporter continuing to cover the President after saying that she wanted to pleasure him because of his commitment to so called abortion rights.
The Democrats that fill the media routinely act as lapdogs for the Democrats that are in public office. If the Bush administration did engineer all of this, then good for them. That the Democrats that have blogs thinks that this is a more significant story than the Iraqi elections tells a lot more about them than anyone else.
The Wash Post - former liberal stronghold -actually has to pretty significant degree. Their WH guy (Dan Froomkin) is really good. I’d think that the conservative press would get at least as much mileage out of this, tho.
I take it you’re a journalist?
This is obviously significantly worse than a major new outlet that ran story after story about a Presidential candidate that had been supplied by an activist from another party and that was based upon documents that were so obviously forged that the network could not find a single expert to verify them.
→ How were the Dems involved in this? Any senior Senator? No? Didn’t think so.
This is much worse than a major cable network not reporting about atrocities in a totalitarian regime to avoid losing access to the “stories” from that regime. Much worse than the same network running stories
→ CNN (?), that sub-section of the Democratic party! They did it again.
Much worse than a so called paper of record knowingly saying that a famine engineered by another totalitarian regime was not happening and then continuing to brag about the Pulitzer Prize based upon that so called reporting when their fraud was revealed.
→ All w/ the knowledge of a Democratic white house, of course, right?
Much worse than a major network having a reporter continuing to cover the President after saying that she wanted to pleasure him because of his commitment to so called abortion rights.
→ Funny! Yet no security risk to the POTUS at any given time.
The Democrats that fill the media routinely act as lapdogs for the Democrats that are in public office. If the Bush administration did engineer all of this, then good for them. That the Democrats that have blogs thinks that this is a more significant story than the Iraqi elections tells a lot more about them than anyone else.
→ If the Republicans STILL can’t get out their message, then maybe they ought to place a call to their pal/employee Armstrong Williams. Maybe he can do another show on them. First they said, Clinton and the Senate are holding everything up. Then, the Dem Senate is blocking everything we attempt to do. Now, they’re in charge of House, Senate, and White House, you’re complaining about the PRESS? Lapdgs? To whom? There’s no Dem in power anymore on a national level.
BTW, dunno where you live, but I saw quite a bit of coverage of the Iraqi elections, positive and negative stories alike.
Also, the line ‘WH press passes are given out by some lower-tier admin’ tells you more about the Administration than anything else. i.e., either they’re lying (God i HOPE they are!), or they’re morons. Would you have some kid who just graduated from college a few years ago control access to the Prez and McClellan (sp?) in a post-9.11 world? HELL no!
the elections are over. no one is covering the iraqi elections anymore. and the possibility that this guy is a repub propaganda outlet dressed as a member of the press corps is a pretty big story.
there are numerous issues here. first, as i mentioned, is whether this guy is a mouth piece for the admin in what is a developing pattern of propaganda and media manipulation(williams, gallager, the medicare piece made to look like news). second, how does a prostitute get security clearance? the guy is connected to someone with influence and the question is how. is it part of the first issue? or did he have some type of illicit relationship with an influential republican who then got him access as a favor or to avoid being outed?
and yes, if the admin is leaking classified info to this guy(i.e. highly possible they leaked the plame info to him) it is a bigger story than anything you mentioned…
and anyways, when is everyone going to drop the “well the other side did it too” defense?
finally, if the media is the liberal/dem lap dogs that they are being made out to be, why aren’t they all over this story(because it is a story)? moreover, why aren’t they looking at the potential issues in this case instead of making it a story on bloggers? even if it somehow ends up as nothing very substantive, it still makes the admin/repubs look terrible.
This isn’t worse or better than some other stories that have or have not been reported. No one, well at least not me, is excusing anyone else for bad reporting of important stories. However, just because someone else did something wrong doesn’t make it ok for this to happen. Both liberal and conservative media have been covering this, to varying degrees. I got my info from some blogs, CNN and Wahington Post, and Fox News. The point isn’t the coverage, it’s the issue of Gannon himself. All the other stuff is smokescreen to cover the real issue.
Slowguy, I was just asking a question. Believe it or not, even though you and I disagree on the assault weapon issue, I do think you have a lot of knowledge and I do read alot of your posts because I think they have substance.
How is your recovery going? Have you been able to resume training yet?
Brett
“Slowguy, I was just asking a question.”
I understand, and I guess my reply was harsher than it was meant to sound. I don’t know exactly what the liberal response would be if a reporter were banned specifically for being gay, but I also can’t imagine that ever happening, because it would be really poor politics. However, I just don’t think the Gannon issue has much to really do with him being gay or straight, so much as being unqualified and un-cleared.
“How is your recovery going? Have you been able to resume training yet?”
The Achilles is coming along. I head back to the surgeon next week, and he’s supposed to give me the thumbs up or down to start jogging/running again. I’m on the bike pretty regularly, on the trainer, and I’ve been in the pool some, but not as much as I’d like. Thanks for asking.
Matt
This story is getting too big to ignore. The mainstream media on the right and left are finally addressing this issue. There’s a lot of links to papers all over the nation that are writing about Gannon/Guckert here: