Very Interesting
Mood:  hungry
Topic: Bought and Paid for...
Every couple of weeks there has been another right wing pundit reveal rgearding their being paid to promote the administrations agenda. This stuff doesn't trouble me as much as other shitty things the administration does nor does it surprise me as it seems to be a tactic right out Karl Rove's playbook.

Never-the-less, Jeff has pointed me to this week's latest reveal and it seems to be a little more entertaining than the others:(Washington Daily News)

"A conservative ringer who was given a press pass to the White House and lobbed softball questions at President Bush quit yesterday after left-leaning Internet bloggers discovered possible ties to gay prostitution.

"The voice goes silent," Jeff Gannon wrote on his Web site. "In consideration of the welfare of me and my family, I have decided to return to private life."


I was wondering which softball questions they were referring to...Aren't most of Bush's press conference questions softball? However, Mr. Gannon seems to have had a little more privaledge than other softball pitchers...(emphasis added)

"Gannon began covering the White House two years ago for an obscure Republican Web site (Talon-News.com). He was known for his friendly questions, including asking Bush at last month's news conference how he could work with Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."

Gannon was also given a classified CIA memo that named agent Valerie Plame, leading to his grilling by the grand jury investigating her outing."

You might remember that Valerie Plame was the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson...The CIA agent that someone in the Bush administration allegedly 'outed.' Wilson has said as a measure of personal revenge against him. This issue is under investigation and could possibly maybe lead to some second term trouble for Dubya and Co.

Anyway, back to Gannon, here's where it starts getting entertaining:

"He came under lefty scrutiny after revelations that the administration was paying conservative pundits to talk up Bush's proposals. By examining Internet records, online sleuths at DailyKos.com figured out that his real name was Jim Guckert and he owned various Web sites, including HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscorts.com and MilitaryEscortsM4M.com.

YEEEAAAHHHHH!!!
Hot Military Studs.com, that's fuckin' hot! I envision the gay version of R. Lee Emery lookin' into that site, "HOORAH, GET IN THERE AND GET ME SOME!"

Anyhow, I care little about somebody's sexual preferences..Why is this an issue exactly?


"The issue here is whether someone with connections to male prostitution was given unfettered access to the White House and copies of internal CIA documents. For a family values administration, that's pretty creepy," said John Aravosis, one of the bloggers chasing the story.

The White House didn't return a call asking how someone using an alias was given daily clearance to enter the White House.

Hmm, I don't realy give a shit about his family values however, considering that this is the President who wants an anti-gay constitutional admendment to be part of his legacy...It does ring rather weirdly.

"On his TalonNews Web site, Gannon had written that liberals were out to get him because he's a white conservative man who owns a gun, drives a sport-utility vehicle and is a born-again Christian.

Yesterday, however, he abruptly quit, and all of the stories he wrote were erased from the Web site. A great many were on gay issues, including one detailing John Kerry's "pro-homosexual platform" that was headlined mockingly, "Kerry Could Become First Gay President."

Self-hating homosexual? That sounds republicanish to me. According to The Daily Kos significant Democrats are pretty happy about the abrupt departure of Gannon:

(Harry Reid spokesperson Jim Manley via Kurtz via Kos)

"Fundamentally, what he was reporting was not truthful."So we take a bite out of small part of the Right Wing Noise Machine, expose yet another pillar of the White House propaganda operation, and -- as a bonus -- we take down a man who used the White House press room to repeat outright lies about the Minority Leader."

Gannon also reported extensively against tom Daschle in South Dakota aiding Thume in victory among other things. One down...Perhaps a million more to go. Now if somebody could get rid of some of the bigger right-wing blowhards such as Limbaugh, Hannity and Coulter we might be on the right track.