Well, imagine my surprise this evening when I check the comments on my blog, and on my post called “Republicans Love Gay Male Hookers” I received this…
I love the comparisons I’m getting to Coulter, given that I loathe her, and am my politics are the furthest thing from hers.
Read the rest of the column, dimwit. You’ll see that the Gannon line is just about the only criticism of the left in the entire thing. I’m far more critical of the right-wing blogosphere.
And if memory serves, Americablog did a hell of a lot more than a Google search to expose Gannon.
..from none other than the Fox News columnist Radley Balko whom I referenced in the post. What, people are actually reading this thing? (OK, don’t get a big head, Russ, according to your own SiteMeter, you only got 559 hits this week, and half of them were probably your own. DailyKos gets that kind of traffic in five minutes. More people read the bumper stickers on your car in rush hour traffic than read this blog in the same hour. On the bright side, Balko doubled your traffic, thanks to the link.)
Obviously I am not much of a threat, for I only got the title of “dimwit”. Perhaps through due diligence I may someday rise to the level of “moonbat”, and maybe, if I persevere, “asshat”.
I did read the entire column by the way, after downing the required amount of Pepto-Bismol necessary to read the Faux News website without producing a Technicolor yawn. Let’s see here… Blogs have become trendy, not a lot of people know what blogs are, there’s blogs for every niche, there’s good blogs and bad blogs, good blogs will rise to the top, blogs often fly off in an attack-dog frenzy and lose track of objectivity, conservative blogs ignored criticism of Judith Miller, leftist blogs have been intolerant by “outing” James Guckert… I think I got it all, but I am a “dimwit”, so maybe someone will help point out what I’m missing.
What I had noticed was Balko’s notion that somehow we lefties are being hypocritical because we “castigate the religious right for intolerance [but] didn’t hesitate to reveal the sexual peculiarities of White House correspondent/sympathizer James Guckert”, which is somehow a sin on par with Judith Miller hyping Iraq’s WMD program in the most widely read and respected newspaper of the so-called “old media”, which helped foster support for an invasion and occupation of a country of no threat to the United States and to the deaths of nearly 1500 US soldiers.
I will cede some ground to Balko; AMERICAblog did do a helluva lot more to uncover Gannon/Guckert’s rent-boy past than just a Google search. They also did a few WHOIS requests, checked out some domain registration records, and followed up on the leads they found. Back in the “old media” days, we used to call this journalism. And considering that AMERICAblog is written by a gay man and that the people Gannon (and Balko) support in the Bush Administration would like to write discrimination against him into the Constitution, well, you can imagine the motivation.
Still, I maintain that the gay angle is merely the pink chiffon icing on the cake. Take the word “gay” out of the story. A gay male prostitute with a pseudonym and tax-related problems, working at first for no news organization, then for a GOP front, consistently secures as day pass to the White House in order to ask softball questions in support of the Bush Administration. See, you don’t even need “gay” in that sentence to make it intriguing. I’m keeping “prostitute” in there, however, because last I checked, that’s not a “sexual peculiarity”, that’s a crime everywhere outside of Nevada (except Washoe and Clark county).
The story is primarily about a security lapse and secondarily about the Bush Administration planting propaganda in the media. But the gay part is still relevant in a tangential fashion because it reveals the pathological hypocrisy of the anti-gay Republican / Evangelical Christian alliance. And after hammering on that salacious tangent for three weeks, we may have finally gotten the attention of that darned “liberal” media. (It’s like TV sweeps week — everyone brings out the gay plotline for sweeps!)
Anyway, l looked around further and found, lo and behold, Balko actually called me out on his own blog, The Agitator:
TheAgitator.com: More Blogs Bashing My Blog-Bashing:
The leftist blogs, on the other hand, seem enthralled with the notion of a right-wing crusader like me defending a gay prostitute like Gannon. See the ‘Republicans Love Gay Male Hookers’ post from RadicalRuss, for example..
No, what I’m enthralled about is the sheer willpower it must take to keep trying to spin a story about security lapses and propaganda into…
Funny how the open-minded, unjudgmental left is so quick to jump to conclusions, and all over an issue involving the outing of a gay man!
Let’s take this slowly, once again, for the righties: “Outing” is when a gay person is presenting themselves as a straight person while living a gay life in private, and then against that gay person’s wishes, the truth of their secret gay life is laid bare for all the world to see. But when a gay person places naked pictures of themselves on the WORLD WIDE WEB, advertising gay sex for hire, it is not “outing”, it is “noticing”. James Guckert “outed” himself the moment he clicked “submit” on his HotMilitaryStuds.com profile. (Oh, wait, he’s a “top”, right? I guess that button was probably “save”, not “submit”.)
This leftie, and I could probably speak for almost all lefties, don’t give a Barney Frank damn whether Guckert is gay or not. The point is that you righties do give a “Real AARP Agenda” / “Bible BANNED – Gay Marriage OK” / “Matthew Shepard wasn’t a hate crime” / “Defense of Traditional Marriage Amendment” / “Homosexuality = Bestiality” damn about opposing civil rights for homosexuals and using gay bashing at every opportunity to score political points in the crimson heartland.
What we’re not non-judgmental about is an administration using its political dominance to assert a right-wing, pro-administration slant to the news by paying columnists to push their agenda, issuing propaganda in the guise of “news reports” on the president’s Medicare prescription drug plan, and planting so-called “reporters” in the White House press room to give voice to RNC talking points through softballs designed to distract from the tough questions the real reporters are asking. We’re not very open-minded about that.
I’m not a righ-wing crusader. I think prostitution should be legal. What you do on your own time with your own money with another consenting adult isn’t any of my business. And it’s certainly no business of the government’s. And I don’t much care who y’all want to sleep with.
In the spirit of healing, let me congratulate Radley on his tolerance. On this issue, we can agree. Prostitution should be legal. Now, since we’re playing in the hypothetical realm, let’s just imagine that prostitution is legal and John Kerry is president. Suppose this reporter is in the White House press room asking President Kerry how he’s going to work with Santorum, Inhofe, Coburn, and all these other anti-gay senators who seemed to have divorced themselves from Christian tolerance. Suppose Little Green Footballs and Free Republic did a little digging and found out that not only did this reporter work for DemocraticUnderground under a pseudonym, and had been denied a hard press pass but circumvented post 9/11 security procedures by getting a day pass for two years, but also this reporter was a completely legal heterosexual prostitute with her naked picture all over the internet. Tell me how many words deep you get into your column, Radley, before the words “scandal” and “investigation” hit the page.
Oh, and I dig women.
OK, so there’s two things we can agree on. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I find this all pretty amusing. Write a column that’s mildly critical of how blogs tend to overreact and take themselves too seriously, and watch the backlash from blogs overreacting and taking themselves too seriously. I rest my case!
Yup, you’re a regular Perry Mason. Nothing to see here folks, just a bunch of hypocritical lefties overreacting to the White House having ties to gay male prostitution. Move along. No story here. Anybody can get a day pass, let’s keep it moving folks. Nothing to see here. GOP front websites are perfectly legit news organizations, let’s keep it moving. We love gay male hookers, so long as they don’t try to get married. Move along. Hey, the Michael Jackson trial is starting soon, isn’t it? Nothing to see here, folks.
The truly amazing thing is the under-reaction to this story.
