Thursday, February 10, 2005

Les Affaires de "Jeff Gannon"

Lest I be left behind by everyone else in the blogosphere (lol) I shall speak to the point of "Jeff Gannon", aka James Guckert, the erstwhile White House "reporter", who resigned this week amid a firestorm of scrutiny on the farther-left members of our blog ecosystem. Christian Grantham has been doing a great job of tracking the story, should you want to read further.

My take....if "Gannon" was getting paid to shill for the White House, that's what's important.

I do not believe, as some assert, that he was admitted to the White House with "no background check" -- nor do I have a problem with them putting his preferred name on his press pass and referring to him by it. I also do not believe that he actually had access to any "classified" material concerning Valerie Plame's alleged "undercover" status -- it seems more likely that he fabricated that, then was forced to admit under oath to the prosecutor investigating the case that he had.

I am particularly annoyed by the gossipy "he owned gay-themed domain names" and "he put beefcake pictures out on the Web". That is a) irrelevant to the situation, b) introduces unnecessary private information to public discourse, and c) implies that anyone who has a beefcake picture out on the Web or owns gay-themed domain names is themselves gay. As I blogged below, we already have enough trouble with "gay by association" -- there is no need to play to stereotypes in order to make your case more lurid.

To be fair, I have, over on Americablog, given my insight as a Texan with a fair plug into local Republican politics into the GOPUSA group with which "Gannon" was associated. Basically, as I said there, it's a bunch of wannabe pundits with a website, run by a person (Bobby Eberle) who I happen to think is an ass.

So anyway.......

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