One Radical Opinion | Jimmy/Jeff “DC Bulldog” Guckert/Gannon
Every decade or so, the forces of politics and media come together to reveal an event of deception, depravity, and corruption. The light of truth shining on the scoundrels becomes so undeniable that the public’s perception of them is forever tarnished, their base of support begins to fracture, and their opponents giggle with unrestrained glee. Nixon’s left-wing detractors could hardly believe the good fortune of the Watergate scandal and were elated as impeachment proceedings led to Nixon’s resignation. The right-wing got their come-uppance when Carter’s advisor on drug policy was seen snorting cocaine, leading to derailment of Carter’s move to liberalize federal drug laws. The pendulum swung back for the left when the Reagan administration was found to be trading arms for hostages in the Iran/Contra Affair, though the Teflon Reagan remained virtually unscathed. The most recent scandal almost brought tears of joy to right-winger’s eyes when it only cost us taxpayers $40 million to find out that Clinton was getting hummers from a chubby intern in the Oval Office.
So allow this unabashedly partisan left-wing columnist a few words and a moment of your time to gloat in the perfect storm of arrogance, chicanery, ineptitude, and hypocrisy that is the story of Talon “News Reporter” Jimmy/Jeff “DC Bulldog” Guckert/Gannon.
If you haven’t been following, here’s the basic plot synopsis. There’s been this (ahem) reporter at the White House press conferences named Jeff Gannon who has made a name for himself as an underhand pitcher* – lobbing softball questions at Press Secretary Scott McLellan and President Bush whenever the real reporters were troubling them with actual questions requiring difficult answers. For example, on February 10 of last year, during the campaign against decorated Vietnam War hero Senator John Kerry, Jeff Gannon asked,
“Since there have been so many questions about what the President was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda, denouncing America’s racist war in Vietnam? Did he testify before Congress that American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else’s medals at the White House to protest a war America was still fighting?”
Questions like that are bound to arouse the attention of anyone who ever attended journalism school or believed in notions like objectivity. The interest in Gannon grew during the Abu Ghraib scandal. On May 10, as real reporters grilled McLellan about the torture of Iraqi prisoners, teacher’s pet Gannon inquired,
“In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you’ve used words like ‘sickening,’ ‘disgusting’ and ‘reprehensible.’ Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam’s rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?”
After the concern over the potential adjective shortage died down, a new scandal was brewing in the form of investigations into the treasonous leak of the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband, Joe Wilson’s whistle blowing on the forged Niger uranium documents. On July 15, Gannon got right to the heart of the matter with this query,
“Last Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that shows that Ambassador Joe Wilson lied when he said his wife didn’t put him up for the mission to Niger. The British inquiry into their own prewar intelligence yesterday concluded that the President’s 16 words were ‘well-founded.’ Doesn’t Joe Wilson owe the President and America an apology for his deception and his own intelligence failure?”
People could sense a pattern being established. Whenever questioning took a turn toward the unflattering truth, McLellan could always count on Gannon for a nice softball lobbed slow and high right over the strike zone. Established reporters grew frustrated, wondering why this unknown fellow writing for a web-only news service, Talon News, was getting chosen for questions over them. The Washington press corps began to wonder why they bothered with the Columbia School of Journalism and whether it really mattered that they represented the most respected television, radio, and print news organizations.
The question that really got people’s attention took place when the President himself called on Gannon at a press conference on January 26. Bush was fending off tough questions about his plan to plunder, I mean, reform Social Security and the faltering state of our economy. Bush called on Gannon, who offered this question,
“Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work – you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people – how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?“
Considering the recent revelations of the Bush Administration paying columnists Armstrong Williams, Mike McManus, and Maggie Gallagher to shill for White House policies, many people began to wonder if the White House had cooked up this Jeff Gannon fellow and his news organization, Talon News. However, the big guns of the mainstream media remained silent on the issue.
Some poking around on the Talon News website unearthed Jeff Gannon “news reports” that were word-for-word press releases from the White House and the Republican Party. Further prodding discovers that Talon News is basically a façade for an organization called GOPUSA, and that the staff and editors of both have little to no journalism experience, but plenty of experience as Republican convention delegates and party chairmen. Jeff Gannon’s entire journalism education was earned at the conservative Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism, which taught him everything one needs to know about broadcast journalism in a two-day workshop. Isn’t it interesting what dedicated bloggers can find thanks to Google’s Site Cache?
However, these facts provided little more than a tempest in a teapot. Gannon had been receiving White House press “day passes” for a little more than two years. There are supposed to be standards regarding which reporters can receive these passes, including that the reporter be a credentialed journalist working for an established news organization which publishes regularly. Apparently a two-day workshop and posting press releases verbatim on a GOP-front website were enough to meet that standard in the Bush White House.
Then the bombshell. Jeff Gannon isn’t his real name. He’s really James Guckert. And along with his own website, JeffGannon.com, he owns the websites HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscorts.com, and MilitaryEscortsM4M.com, all of which features personal ads for men looking for gay sex hookups, either consensually or for hire. Digging deeper into these websites, the bloggers find ads for Jeff Gannon, sometimes under the nickname “DC Bulldog”, offering himself for “escort” services, and featuring nude photos of himself with the caption that he’s “a top” and boasting that he’s endowed with “8+ cut”.
Jimmy/Jeff resigns from his post at Talon News and the blogosphere continues to mine the mother lode on Guckert/Gannon. An observant blogger notices that Jeff was present for a White House press conference when Ari Fleischer was still press secretary, a month before Talon News even existed. Slowly the mainstream media starts to take notice. The Washington Post notes that Gannon had access to an internal CIA memo that named Valerie Plame as a covert operative and was subpoenaed by the grand jury investigating the leak. A producer for a major television network points out that Gannon was always a solid source for scoops on the Bush Administration, including Gannon mentioning the exact hour Bush would be appearing on television to announce the invasion of Iraq four hours before it happened and before anyone outside the Administration knew the invasion was certain.
So let’s summarize. A gay male prostitute with two hours of journalism training from a conservative institute, representing no established news organization until a GOP website creates one for him, uses a pseudonym and manages to elude any sort of background checks to gain access to the administration, the President, and internal CIA documents, despite the fact that his bald, ripped, naked body is advertised all over the internet, all for the purpose of asking questions designed to make the Administration look good and avoid tough issues at press conferences.
Did I miss anything? Oh, yes, I missed the part where Congress’ call for hearings into the matter becomes a deafening roar, the Justice Department empowers a special counsel to look into the matter, the mainstream media pushes this scandal to the front page and the top of the hour, the right-wing pundits scream about the decline of morality and call for a return to integrity in the White House, and we spend $40 million dollars of taxpayer money prior to beginning impeachment proceedings.
The fallout from this is still ongoing. The media is beginning to pick up the story. The gay porn stuff is certainly titillating, but that’s not the primary issue, which is how the people we are depending on to protect us from terrorists can’t provide a level of vetting to match a part-time blogger with an ISP and a simple Google search? Is the administration that incompetent? Since this is the gang that couldn’t prevent 9/11 despite getting 52 warnings of catastrophic hijackings in the six months prior, reports of Muslim Arab nationals learning to fly planes but not land them, a briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike inside US“, and dire warnings regarding the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs, perhaps “incompetent” is too light a word. But they were either incompetent in this case, or they wanted Jimmy/Jeff to be there.
The secondary angle on this story is the Administration continuing to produce fake news to promote its agenda, first with clever propaganda touting the benefits of the president’s Medicare Prescription Benefits, disguised as “news reports” from a fake reporter. Then there was the Williams / McManus / Gallagher payola for favorable columns. Now it’s a shill planted in press conferences to ask friendly questions. This administration acts like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men – “the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”
However, the gay sex angle of the story is also of importance. It doesn’t really matter whether the sex in question is gay or straight. I should think that a female or male reporter whose nude pictures were on the internet soliciting straight sex would be just as salacious and worthy of a second look from the White House. However, the gay part adds a special twist when framed against a White House that has made their gay-baiting “defense of traditional marriage” their election strategy, a President who promised to bring “honor and integrity” to the Oval Office (read: no extra-marital fellatio), and a Jimmy/Jeff’s own homophobic articles on Talon News that defended Senator Rick Santorum’s comments comparing homosexuality to bestiality and mocked John Kerry with a headline reading “Kerry Could Become the First Gay President.”
In a recent CNN interview, Jimmy/Jeff is now whining that he made mistakes in his past and wonders if reporter’s private lives are now “fair game”. Private lives? Jimmy/Jeff, you posted photos soliciting yourself for gay sex on the internet! They call it the “world wide web”; it’s the very antithesis of “private”. “Private” would be something like, oh, I don’t know, receiving consensual oral sex from an adult female intern in your own closed office space. Plus, how can you call them mistakes from your “past” when many of the links to your nude, bald, ripped, 8″+ cut photos and solicitations of sex for hire are still being published? “Past” would be something like, hmm, maybe just perhaps, a gay sex ad that was published on the internet but have long since been removed. But Jimmy/Jeff, in your defense, I suppose it depends on what the definition of “was” is.
*Gay slang pun completely intended.
