If it Quacks Like a Duck...
the happy roves
A lot of my friends outside the blogosphere are slow to understand the glee with which I've been chortling over the Gannon/Guckert story this week. They can all appreciate the grand irony of the fact that a guy who's a media whore for the White House is actually a real-life whore, and all it takes is a quick description of the tasteful photo layout of hotmilitarystuds.com to get everyone flying to AmericaBlog for a glimse of Gannon's cannon. It has lead many of them to a deep crisis of faith in the major news media outlets, feeling cheated that ABC, CBS, Faux News and others have all failed to alert them to the delightful details of the story. Makes everyone wonder what else they might be missing.
But the larger political implications are not immediately obvious to people who don't spend most of their waking hours thinking about what this bunch of crooked bastards has done to the country -- until they start to connect the dots. CBS News may not be willing to cover the G/G story onto their nightly network newscast, but Dotty Lynch, Senior Political Editor for CBS News, is asking the obvious question in an online column (emphasis mine):
Rove's dominance of White House and Republican politics, Gannon's aggressively partisan work and the ease with which he got day passes for the White House press room the past two years make it hard to believe that he wasn't at least implicitly sanctioned by the "boy genius." Rove, who rarely gave on-the-record interviews to the MSM (mainstream media), had time to talk to GOPUSA, which owns Talon.The fact is that G/G slid straight from a career as a Beltway rentboy into the White House press room with no previous journalistic experience and no background check, and he did so at a time when terror alerts were flickering from lilting fuscia to enraged magenta and the administration was strip mining civil rights in the interest of "national security." Somebody quite powerful had to vouch for him -- grease his wheels, so to speak. And knowing the complete control of all things media related (and otherwise) that Rove maintains, it is inconceivable that G/G did not have his blessing.
G/G knew about the secret CIA memo Valerie Plame had written about Joe Wilson. He bragged about knowing of the bombing of Iraq before it happened, information which could only have come from someone with extreme insider knowledge. He managed to get daily passes to white house briefings for two years when Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Maureen Dowd was turned down.
So the speculation is furious in the blogosphere over who his "patron" might be, for obvious reasons. Could the man who crafted a Bush victory by fanning the flames of hatred against gays be himself indulging in a little love that dare not speak its name? A trip over to the Freepers to listen in on how the wingnuts are responding to the Gannon news gives us a hint of how said relationship might resonate with the GOP base:
I am just not comfortable with a homosexual claiming to support the conservative cause. It undermines the integrity of Conservatism and does nothing but hinder the GOP agenda.Now, at this point it's all just furious speculation and fun with finger pointing. But if by some wild chance that's the way this story inevitably goes down, folks, I'll be giving it up to the greatest dramatic ironist of all time -- God.
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 2/19/2005 12:00:00 AM
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