February 23, 2005 by s.z.

Items of Interest! 1.  John at Blongenlust suggests a familiar face as a replacement for Jeff Gannon. 2.  Krup at I'm Just Sayin' offers another secret tape made by George Bush's good friend and spiritual advisor, Doug Weed ... I mean Wead. 3. Frederick at BestBushBlog offers the shocking story of how breasts are reproductive organs (presumably babies grow inside them, which is why bosoms poke out the way they do). 4.  Jim at Rittenhouse Review posts some thoughts on that vital question first posed by Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged: when do we (as in me) sleep?  4:39:22 AM

Dummies: A Viable Niche Audience for Some Instapundit advises: [I]f you're looking for delightful bloggish diversion, head over to Tom Maguire's place, where he lays out a link-rich post on Gannon / Guckert for dummies. Emphasis on the "dummies" part, it looks like. posted at 11:32 AM by Glenn Reynolds  While we found the post lacking, we wouldn't have gone so far as to call the Tom Maguire's readers "dummies" (but then, we didn't find it a delightful bloggish diversion either, so maybe you can't go by us).  While much of the piece was accurate, a lot wasn't, and we didn't agree with most of the conclusions (presumably because unlike Maguire, we aren't part of the "White House apologists."  But since it has been endorsed by Glenn Reynolds (and so now serves as the Right's official history of GannonGuckertGate), we will address some of parts that we believe were incomplete, inaccurate, and/or dumb. Jeff Gannon came to fame during a Presidential press conference on Jan. 26 with a factually deficient question wondering how Bush could negotiate with Congressional Democrats who have "divorced themselves from reality" (See Dan Froomkin, Jan 27 WaPo). Well, the question was both factually deficient AND Rush Limbaugh-enriched, because Harry Reid was only talking about "soup lines" in Dittoheadland  (See Media Matters, January 26: Talon News "reporter" lobs Bush another softball.) Finally, there was one more prominent hook to the Jeff Gannon story, but late-comers may find that is no longer a hot topic of discussion: Jeff Gannon was reported to have been subpoenaed by the grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame leak, Yes, even Jeff Gannon reported as much: Here's a FreeRepublic post from March 6, 2004 authored by Mr. Gannon: Well, as many of you now know, I have been subpeonaed by the Federal grand jury for testimony in the CIA leak probe. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1092073/posts And there was also this Talon News story from March 9 (which was helpfully posted to FreeRepublic): Federal Grand Jury Could Subpoena Talon News Correspondent (and RighTalk host) WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- A federal grand jury has subpoenaed White House records on administration contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets in a special investigation into the alleged improper leak of a covert CIA official's identity to columnist Robert Novak last July. Talon News has learned that one of the journalists being targeted is Jeff Gannon, Washington Bureau Chief and White House correspondent for Talon News. So, yes, Jeff Gannon was reported to have been subpeonaed by the Grand Jury.  But back to Tom Maguire: and there was some evidence that he had access to a leaked, classified intelligence memo.  Well, there was JimJeff trying to make it look like he had access to a purported classified document (one which the CIA said was actually a forgery containing inaccurate information) about Plame's involvment in her husband's assignment to Niger.  But all of the "evidence" out there seems to have been planted by Jeff -- meaning that it's not very reliable. This angle caused much excitement amongst the investigators of the left, and eventually led Congresswoman Louise Slaughter to ask Special Counsel Fitzgerald to investigate this point.  In fact, the Plame Connection was so exciting that the NY Times led with it on Feb 11 (we mock them here). Whether or not JimJeff had access to a classified document, it's obvious that he was part the effort to claim that a fabricated (IMHO) document proved that Joseph Wilson got the Niger gig due to his wife's efforts, and so the White House was justified in leaking Plame's name and identity to Novak.  The FBI considered this post-Novak issue worth investigating, and questioned JimJeff.  Whether he told the investigators that all he knew about the document he learned from the Wall Street Journal story, or whether he refused to answer their questions to protect his sources (or whether he indicated that he got a copy of this document from Lewis Libby) is something that only JimJeff, the FBI, and the grand jury seems to know at this point. The conspiracy-minded on the left are hoping that questions will suffice, and that the burden of proof will somehow shift over to the White House apologists (OK, that includes me).  This will, the critics hope, present the apologists with the nearly impossible task of proving a negative - no one has found a smoking gun memo linking Karl Rove to Bobby Eberle, but that does not mean it does not exist, now does it? However, to this knife-fight the apologists are bringing Occam's Razor - the questions raised by the critics have simpler, non-conspiracy minded answers. We already posted our non-conspiracy minded answers, but that doesn't mean that we can't pick at the flaws in Tom's.  So, as Tom says, let's dig in: Let's dig in - is Talon News a creation of Karl Rove?  Who knows?  But the alternative view is that Bobby Eberle, age 36, was simply pursuing a market opportunity - Fox News makes money, Rush Limbaugh makes money, and maybe a low-cost, web-based news service could make money.  Talon News could make money? How?  It's only "clients" are GOPUSA (which wouldn't have paid anything for the content, since it's also owned by Bobby Eberle) and MensNewsDaily, which doesn't appear to pay for any of its content either. And it seems that one of the reason's that JimJeff couldn't get accredited by the Hill was that Talon wasn't making any money.  Here's part of what the Standing Committee of Correspondents told Jeff when they rejected his application: "Committee guidelines require that on-line publications 'must charge a market rate fee for subscription or access, or carry paid advertising at current market rates.' You have not demonstrated to the committee's satisfaction that Talon News has any paid subscribers, that paid client newspapers publish Talon News stories, or that it is supported by advertising."  Now, if Tom wanted to claim that GOPUSA was just a money-making opportunity, I'd almost buy it (although it's not what Bobby Eberle said -- he claimed that he started it to "do some good" and to "spread the conservative message"), but then Tom has to explain why GOPUSA, which basically consists of rightwing opinion pieces and local GOP news, was able to get a "reporter" accredited to the White House.  (And Tom, Rush Limbaugh calls himself an entertainer, and isn't accredited to the White House press corps, which basically makes my point for me.) Attract some advertiser support (And some Scaife money? He denies having backers, and I have seen nothing to contradict that), and perhaps fame and fortune await.  Land of opportunity! What Bobby said in that NYT piece that Tom links to is" Mr. Eberle said that he and some friends founded Gopusa out of his Houston home about five years ago and later created Talon News. They expanded by buying another conservative site called MillionsofAmericans.com." Then, per the article, Bobby "said that he was not bankrolled by any backers."  But those friends who helped found GOPUSA presumably have contributed some funds, as have other contributers.  Here's what Bobby told in Evote.com in an E-interview in April 2003: EVOTE.COM: Who funds GOPUSA? Bobby Eberle: Not enough people!  EVOTE.COM: LOL! Bobby Eberle: Seriously... we are developing a structure to generate revenue from ad sales, premium content, etc. But most has come from the staff right now. EVOTE.COM: Do you accept contributions?  Bobby Eberle: Yes, we are planning to put up a sponsor page soon for people to help us out. (Off topic, but also interesting, from the same interview EVOTE.COM: You're confident that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction will eventually be found?  Bobby Eberle: On finding WMD... Absolutely! ) So, the money behind GOPUSA has not been accounted for.  Oh, and where did GOPUSA get the funds to buy Bruce Eberle's subscribers list last spring -- from "the staff" or from "sponsors"?    And in this alternative view, Bobby Eberle will talk with a Texas twang and he may not shy from hinting that he has connections to Rove and Bush.  However, although Karl Rove did give an interview to Talon News, evidence of a meaningful connection has not surfaced. No, it hasn't.  But since the essence of a successful political "dirty trick" is to keep your name out of it, this is a less compelling point that it might be otherwise. So, this point remains unresolved, and worth further investigation, it would seem. Well, what about the security question?  Maureen Dowd got turned down for a White House pass - surely there are standards?  Yes, there are (and stop calling me "Shirley".)  However, Gannon was operating on a day pass, not a permanent White House "press pass" for which the standards (and entitlements) are higher.  A day pass will not get a person on the President's plane to Europe, for example. However, in the post- 9/11 White House, reporters are not supposed to be granted daily access to the White House by "operating on a day pass."  It seems that JimJeff (with either the active or pasive complicity of the White House Press Office) was doing an end run around the Secret Service guidelines about the security processing those getting regular access to the White House should undergo.  Per Salon: Still, without any hope of Hill credentials, Guckert had no prospect of landing a White House hard pass, so he simply adopted the day-pass system and turned it into his personal revolving door. In doing so, he created his own variation on a now-defunct third category of White House press pass, called the card index, which once allowed journalists to gain access to press briefings for weeks or months a time. But this system is defunct for one simple reason: It's not secure enough. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the Secret Service did away with the card index, according to Martha Kumar, a professor of political science at Towson State University and an expert on White House press operations. See also Eric Boehlert's latest on the issue, which says: So the mystery remains: How did Guckert, with absolutely no journalism background and working for a phony news organization, manage to adopt the day-pass system as his own while sidestepping a thorough background check that might have detected his sordid past? That's the central question the White House refuses to address, So, while JimJeff might not have have traveled on Air Force One, he was still in violation of current procedures, and the White House has yet to explain why this was allowed to happen (and why a reporter from an outfit called GOPUSA was allowed day passes when presumably someone from DemocraticUnderground wouldn't have been). OK, then, how did Gannon get into a Presidential press conference? Those televised East Room extravaganza must have special security and clearances, right?  Well, I imagine they do; however, Gannon asked his famous question at a hastily-called, impromptu press conference right down in Gannon's daily haunt, the Brady Room.  Except that JimJeff said that he'd been present at FOUR presidential press conferences (McClellan Tells 'E&P' He Didn't Know Guckert Used Fake Name), and got to ask President Bush a question another time too.  So, either Tom imagines wrong about all that special security for presidential extravaganzas, or else the WH was ignoring the rules for their special friend JimJeff. The Plame connection?  Dan Froomkin of the WaPo identified a plausible alternative, now being picked up by Gannon himself in a Times interview (Feb 20/ Ralph Blumenthal) - the information on which Gannon relied had been reported in the Wall Street Journal several weeks before Gannon used it in an interview with Amb. Joseph Wilson.  Tommy boy, even if you are writing for dummies, you should get your facts straight.  The WTJ article mentioning the purported memo came out on 17 October, 2003.  JimJeff's interview is dated 28 October, 2003 (here's a link to a version of it at MensNewsDaily that hasn't yet been erased).  That's not several weeks later, that's 11 days later.  (And one can't blame Froomkin for this error -- he says JimJeff's first mention of the memo came "several days after" the WSJ story.  Yes, even though one of Froomkin's sources for his report, the blog of one Tom Maguire, blew the time line, Froomkin had the correct information.) Does that prove that Gannon did not receive a leak?  Of course not, but what is the evidence that he did, and why did he sit on his story for two weeks?  No, there is no evidence that JimJeff got a copy of this memo (except for all of JimJeff's talk about protecting sources and comments about how copies of the memo were easy to obtain).  However, if he did get a copy, who says he got one at the same time the Wall Street Journal did?  If copies were indeed floating around freely amongst the various people eager to discredit Wilson, JImJeff still wouldn't have been at the top of the list to get one -- in fact, only after JimJeff had secured the interview with Wilson would it make sense for those trying to defend the VP's office to pass one of the fabricated memos to him.  Oh, and we thought you said the time between the WSJ piece and JimJeff's mention of it was "several weeks", not "two weeks," Tom. I have not seen any reported follow-up with Rep. Louise Slaughter on this - enterprising reporters might want to contact her. Since I personally believe that the document mentioned by those "insiders" at the WSJ was a fabrication meant to hurt Wilson, if I were contacting Slaughter, I'd advise her to let the Plame investigation deal with this matter.  But investigating how and why JimJeff was allowed to use a White House press office daily pass for over TWO YEARS would still be a good idea. Almost done - wouldn't Scott McClellan like having a friendly face in the briefing room, and isn't Talon News a useful outlet for Republican stories?  Well, press room dynamics are such that there are other ways for Scott McClellan to wriggle out of a tight spot - Dan Froomkin cites Dana Milbank as reporting, for example, that Raghubir Goyal of the India Globe can always be counted on to ask about "the perfidies of Pakistan". Hey, nobody said that JimJeff was Scottie's only way to wriggle out of a tight spot (Scottie is quite the wriggler).  However, as JimJeff himself has said, Scottie seemed to know what he'd get from JimJeff, and Scottie called on JimJeff more frequently that one would assume a reporter from a "news service" whose news was only seen on GOPUSA and MensNewsDaily would deserve -- unless Scottie LIKED the questions, that is Hey, let's go back to Tom's friend Froomkin, and his March 2004 column (the link helpfully provided in the piece to which Tom linked ): Gannon won't talk about it [the memo]. But he does keep lobbing those softballs. Sometimes he even brings props. And press secretary McClellan seems to appreciate it. Yesterday, for instance, McClellan was getting hammered with questions about the 9/11 commission and the possible inappropriate juxtaposition of a visit to a 9/11 memorial with a fundraiser on Thursday. It was getting ugly. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response," McClellan said in response to a jibe. (See the full text of the briefing.) Then he saw daylight: "Go ahead, Jeff." Gannon: "Thank you. First of all, I hope the grand jury didn't force you to turn over the wedding card I sent to you and your wife. (Laughter.) Do you see any hypocrisy in the controversy about the President's mention of 9/11 in his ads, when Democratic icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt's campaign issued this button, that says, 'Remember Pearl Harbor'? I have a visual aid for folks watching at home."  So, it wasn't the meanies at Media Matters that came up with (in retaliation for JimJeff's "soup line/"lack of reality" question) the meme that Scottie went to JimJeff for softball questions when things got tense during press conferences. But let's go to Tom's next point: As to the idea that Karl Rove needs a place to plant his stories - the very notion is an affront to the hard-won reputations of Matt Drudge, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editors, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard. Well, I'm sure that Karl uses them when he can, but that doesn't mean that he wouldn't use whatever disposable tool was at hand for a dirty trick or two if suited his purpose.  (Hey, we too would like to believe that Karl can find better evil minions than those at GOPUSA, but one never knows.) Now, Dotty Lynch of CBS News has gone off-message, with the Rather ironic observation that, in the Daschle-Thune campaign, Gannon actually broke real news, such as details about Daschle's place of residence. "This guy (Gannon) became the dumping ground for opposition research", is a quote she runs from some Daschle aides,  and surely CBS knows a dumping ground when they see one. So, Tom's rebuttal of this point is "It takes one to know one"?  Um, sorry, but I don't think that this actually negates anything that Lynch said. The endgame for the Guckert saga is not clear.  One hopes that lack of any evidence of wrongdoing will force the story to go away and stop bothering us.  However, our Bold Prediction is that the Times editors, following the trail blazed by Dowd and Rich, will deliver a dire "questions remain unanswered" editorial sometime this week. Yes, I'm sure that "one" hopes the story will go away, but before it does, surely "one" and his comrades who were so eager to get the Eason Jordan transcript would want to know more about how GOPUSA was deemed a credible news organization by the White House, and how its only paid reporter got daily access to the White House without a thorough background check, right?  You know, just to see what the facts actually are, and ensure that the news is fair and balanced. The critics may continue to invent allegations, and then insist that where there is smoke, there is fire.  The apologists will continue to respond that sometimes, where there is smoke there are only people throwing smoke grenades. So, which is it -- fire or smoke grenades?  Per Tom, it doesn't matter, and everybody should just stop talking about GannonGuckertGate because he is tired of it.    MORE:  Comments are open, of course.  If there is a significant talking point from the left that I have omitted, it is due to my poor research rather than intelligent design. And our effort to respond to those omissions is just an effort to help Tom's lack of intelligent design. Jeff Goldstein has been The Scourge of the Left on this story - this post has lots of useful mockery and links; scroll around for laughs and more. Well, only if by "Scourge" one means "mildly annoying twit whose blatant hypocrisy and side-stepping of the point provides some inadvertant laughs."  And here's an example of the kind of laughs Jeff provides:  “[...] ‘People criticize me for being a Christian and having some of these questionable things in my past,’ he said. ‘I believe in a God of forgiveness.’” Well, God likely will forgive you, Mr. Gannon.  But sadly, for your being a gay Rethug, the party of tolerance never ever will… Yes, it's just the mean-spirited Democrats who will never forgive JimJeff, while the Republicans (the "Values" party) have gone on the record to say that they have no problems with homosexuals in general (and former male escorts in particular) working in the White House.  That's the best laugh I've had all hour! Hindrocket blasts the character of folks who think that outing a gay reporter somehow advanced the national debate. Um, yeah.  Jeff was outed as a "gay reporter" -- because pointing out that that somebody advertised his services as a prostitute on the Internet is the same thing as outing that person as a homosexual.  And Hindrocket is a credible expert on character because he has such a fine one ... Finally, full disclosure, we are slowly becoming James Guckert fans here - a small-time hustler tried to make it as a reporter, and what blogger can not relate?  Let's give him the last word, from his chat with Howard Kurtz: "I've made mistakes in my past," he said yesterday. "Does my past mean I can't have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?" You know, where I come from, one is deemed a hypocrite for asking for one's past to be forgiven while one is still trying to make money from it.  See AMERICAblog for the latest on JimJeff's efforts to sell those pornographic "military escort sites" for thousands of dollars).  See also where JimJeff told Editor&Publisher that he's working on a journal that could become a book (my suggested title: Bulldog: White House Reporter by Day, Hooker by Night), and making plans to enter the paid speaker circuit to discuss his experiences.  (Unless he references those mistakes of his past, I don't think there will be much interest in either of those projects.)  But should all this disqualify him from being a journalist?  Well, not in Tom's world, a place where a guy whose "reporting" consisted mainly of cutting and pasting transcripts and news releases from the White House and GOP (and who is a known liar) can be called a "journalist," and where presumably Bob Guccione can be the White House Press Secretary. In the Kingdom of the Dummies, I guess bloggers like Tom Maguire and Glenn Reynolds are the kings. 2:50:32 AM