PropaGannon

The folks hanging off the right wing of our fine country have recently been bragging about the "scalps" in the MSM they've "collected" - meaning Rather and Eason Jordan. They compare this to Gannongate and scoff "Jeff Who?" The implication being that the right wing bags big name journalists, while the rest of us merely expose Talon News operatives.

Putting aside the fact that I had never heard of Eason Jordan prior to his unsubstantiated accusations against our military (oh Eason, we hardly knew ye), the bloodthirsty right simply misses the key point.

Gannongate is not about Jeff Gannon. It's not about Jim Gluckert. It's about the White House. The White House that ushered this online gay escort in under a false name for a press briefing with Scotty McClellan as early as February, 2003 - before Gannon was even working as a fake journalist- and for two years thereafter.

So the question becomes, just how did this character get White House press
credentials, despite supposed post-Sept. 11 security requirements? Bruce
Bartlett, a conservative columnist who worked in the Reagan and first Bush
administrations, says that "if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff
had to be involved in maintaining his cover." In other words, the White House
wanted him at those briefings and wanted him to ask his softball questions, most
likely to divert attention when legitimate reporters were getting too pushy.

Bizzare.

And there is a part of me that thinks that this White House could never be so sloppy. Get a former online gay prostitute to ask President Bush in a press conference about Democrats "who have divorced themselves from reality," and expect it to fly over the heads of the American people? It's so outrageous, so preposterous, that I'm left wondering if this is some elaborate Oswaldian frame-up. Will Gannon take the fall for exposing Valerie Plame? Can't be... someone in the Administration had to tell Gannon, and therein lies the felony. So what's going on here?

The other part of me thinks that maybe the White House actually does think we are dumb enough to skip right over this plant in the pressroom. Hell, the MSM did it for two years. It took the blogs to expose this phony. And is it any more bizzare really than the White House paying a quarter million dollars to another "journalist" to write love letters about its policies?