On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 21:03:08 -0500, "Pookie"
<pookie18323@optonline.net> wrote:

Republicans, bloggers and gays, oh my!
Posted: February 23, 2005
7:40 p.m. Eastern



By Ann Coulter



In response to the public disgrace and ruin of New York Times editor
Howell
Raines, CBS anchor Dan Rather and CNN news director Eason Jordan, liberals
are directing their fury at the blogs. Once derided as people sitting
around
their living rooms in pajamas, now obscure writers for unknown websites
are
coming under more intensive background checks than CIA agents.

The heretofore-unknown Jeff Gannon of the heretofore-unknown "Talon News"
service was caught red-handed asking friendly questions at a White House
press briefing. Now the media is hot on the trail of a gay escort service
that Gannon may have run some years ago. Are we supposed to like gay
people
now, or hate them? Is there a website where I can go to and find out how
the
Democrats want me to feel about gay people on a moment-to-moment basis?

Liberals keep rolling out a scrolling series of attacks on Gannon for
their
Two Minutes Hate, but all their other charges against him fall apart after
three seconds of scrutiny. Gannon's only offense is that he may be gay.

First, liberals claimed Gannon was a White House plant who received a
press
pass so that he could ask softball questions - a perk reserved for New
York
Times reporters during the Clinton years. Their proof was that while
"real"
journalists (like Jayson Blair) were being denied press passes, Gannon had
one, even though he writes for a website that no one has ever heard of -
but
still big enough to be a target of liberal hatred! (By the way, if writing
for a news organization with no viewers is grounds for being denied a
press
pass, why do MSNBC reporters have them?)

On the op-ed page of the New York Times, Maureen Dowd openly lied about
the
press pass, saying: "I was rejected for a White House press pass at the
start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion
problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the 'Barberini Faun' is
credentialed?"

Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that
dyspeptic, old Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president. Still,
it
would be suspicious if Dowd were denied a press pass while someone from
"Talon News" got one, even if he is a better reporter.

But Dowd was talking about two different passes without telling her
readers
(a process now known in journalism schools as "Dowdification"). Gannon
didn't have a permanent pass; he had only a daily pass. Almost anyone can
get a daily pass - even famed Times fantasist Maureen Dowd could have
gotten
one of those. A daily pass and a permanent pass are altogether different
animals. The entire linchpin of Dowd's column was a lie. (And I'm sure the
Times' public editor will get right on Dowd's deception.)

Finally, liberals expressed shock and dismay that Gannon's real name is
"James Guckert." On MSNBC's "Hardball," Chris Matthews introduced the
Gannon
scandal this way: "Coming up, how did a fake news reporter from a
right-wing
website get inside the White House press briefings and presidential news
conferences?"

Reporter David Shuster then gave a report on "the phony alias Guckert used
to play journalist" - as opposed to the real name Shuster uses to play
journalist. (You can tell Schuster is a crackerjack journalist because he
uses phrases like "phony alias.") With all the subtlety of a gay-bashing
skinhead, Matthews spent the rest of the segment seeing how many times he
could smear Gannon by mentioning "HotMilitaryStuds.com" and laughing.

Any day now, Matthews will devote entire shows to exposing Larry Zeigler,
Gerald Riviera and Michael Weiner - aka Larry King, Geraldo Rivera and
Matthews' former MSNBC colleague Michael Savage. As a newspaper reporter,
Wolf Blitzer has written under the names Ze'ev Blitzer and Ze'ev Barak.
The
greatest essayist of modern times was Eric Blair, aka George Orwell. The
worst essayist of modern times is "TRB" of The New Republic.

Air America radio host and "Nanny" impersonator "Randi Rhodes" goes by a
fake name, and she won't even tell people what her real last name is. (She
says for "privacy reasons." That name must be a real doozy.) As
Insideradio.com describes Rhodes, she refuses "to withhold anything from
her
listeners" and says conservatives "are less likely to share such things."
How about sharing your name, Randi? We promise not to laugh.

Democrats in Congress actually demanded that an independent prosecutor
investigate how Gannon got into White House press conferences while
writing
under an invented name. How did Gary Hartpence, Billy Blythe and John Kohn
(Gary Hart, Bill Clinton and John Kerry) run for president under invented
names? Admittedly, these men were not reporters for the prestigious "Talon
News" service; they were merely Democrats running for president.

Liberals keep telling us the media isn't liberal, but in order to
retaliate
for the decimation of major news organizations like the New York Times,
CBS
News and CNN, all they can do is produce the scalp of an obscure writer
for
an unknown conservative Web page. And unlike Raines, Rather and Jordan,
they
can't even get Gannon for incompetence on the job. (Also unlike Raines,
Rather and Jordan, Gannon has appeared on television and given a series of
creditable interviews in his own defense, proving our gays are more macho
than their straights.)

Gannon didn't write about gays. No "hypocrisy" is being exposed. Liberals'
hateful, frothing-at-the-mouth campaign against Gannon consists solely of
their claim that he is gay.


http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43011