Family values.
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From The New York Daily News, 2/18/05:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/281982p-241637c.html
Strange bedfellows
Gannon affair is wackiest White House press flap yet
The latest media-manipulation scandal emanating from the Bush
administration isn't just outrageous - it's downright sleazy.
The man in the photo is a pro-Bush political operative named James
Guckert, who until recently wrote for two conservative Web sites under
the alias Jeff Gannon while apparently leading a double life in the
world of gay porn and prostitution.
Guckert got a pass to enter the White House, where the President
called on him at briefings.
Guckert couldn't get congressional press passes based on his status as
correspondent for the obscure, Texas-based Web sites Talonnews.com and
GOPUSA.com.
Media access to Congress is controlled by an association of
journalists.
But Guckert somehow got into White House press briefings.
There, he didn't ask normal questions, but instead lobbed partisan
fluffballs for Bush to knock out of the park.
Last month, his query to the President was how Bush expected to work
with leading Democrats in Congress "who seem to have divorced
themselves from reality."
Guckert's charade collapsed when a liberal Web site,
www.americablog.org, revealed he had set up a gay escort Web site and
posted racy nude shots of himself, along with various rates for short
sessions and weekends.
Guckert quickly resigned from Talon, and his stories have vanished
from the site.
It boggles the mind to think that a gay prostitute using a fake name
might have passed through security screens to join a public Q & A
session with the leader of the free world.
Equally sensational is the possibility, suggested by members of
Congress and major news organizations, that the White House
deliberately helped set up Guckert with credentials and privileged
information.
It gets stranger.
Guckert's name has popped up in the Valerie Plame affair, in which
Plame's status as an undercover CIA agent was leaked to columnist
Robert Novak - in violation of federal law - and published in 2003.
The leak - whatever its source - is widely thought to be an act of
political retaliation against Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, a former
acting ambassador to Iraq who publicly questioned the Bush
administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction.
In an interview for Talon with Wilson, according to The Washington
Post, Guckert referred to "an internal government memo prepared by
U.S. intelligence personnel" with considerably more detailed
information than other journalists had published.
Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time
Magazine are facing jail time for not revealing their sources to a
special prosecutor investigating the Plame leak.
But it seems Guckert, who appears to have known quite a bit about
Plame, isn't getting comparable scrutiny.
Democrats and a wide range of media organizations are understandably
up in arms. New York Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-Rochester) is leading
calls for the special prosecutor in the Plame matter to investigate
Guckert.
But the larger issue is the Bush administration's cynical attempt to
control the public debate with payments to columnists such as
Armstrong Williams and apparently special treatment for Guckert/Gannon
- whoever he really is.
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http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
Scientology crooks: http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
Scientology murder: http://PerkinsTragedy.org
"And I sure wouldn't bet a damn buck that Bush's two
girls haven't done their fair share of carpet cleaning!" - AB
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