Right-wing apologetics round-up

Convinced, I suppose, that the GannyGuck story isn't going away any time soon, surprised that the left is playing hardball, and annoyed that the "you're invading his privacy" schtick isn't working, some conservatives are chiming in with more nonsense; including Ann Coulter calling Helen Thomas an "old Arab," as you've probably seen, or this, possible the worst column I've ever read.  A few others are worth commenting on in detail.

Thinking that you won't read the article, Instapundit starts by agreeing with Hendrik Hertzberg that it's "Nothinggate" rather than "Gannongate."  Hertzberg says this, though, because:

nothing is what is likely to come of it. What all the memorable scandals of the past thirty years—real and fake alike, from Watergate to the Clinton impeachment—have had in common is that the opposition party controlled at least one house of Congress, which gave it the power to hold hearings and issue subpoenas. If Bush ends up having an easier time of it in his second term than any of his two-term predecessors since F.D.R., it won’t be because the scandals aren’t there. It’ll be because the tools to excavate them are under lock and key.

Not because he thinks it's not a story.  I'm certainly not surprised to see a colleague on the right taking something out of context.  But then when he decides to quote a David Corn column, it gets worse:

But don't listen to me. Listen to David Corn:

But throughout this scandal, I have wondered if the Gannon affair may be smaller than it seems. I expressed several concerns in an earlier column. Still, in response to the emails, I decided to heed the call and look further. What I found leads me to ask--gasp!--if Gannon/Guckert, on a few but not all fronts, has received a quasi-bum rap. . . .

Bloggers should think hard when they complain about standards for passes for White House press briefings.

See that ellipses after the first paragraph of the Corn column he's quoting?  Well, the sentence after that, that Glenn conveniently forgot to quote, is

Let me stipulate that how Gannon/Guckert came to be permitted into the White House press room is a worthy topic of inquiry.

Nor, of course, does Glenn quote the other inconvenient part of Corn's column:

Serious questions do remain as to why and how the Bush White House's press operation granted access to Gannon/Guckert, a correspondent for the Talon News. Should a fellow with a fake identity--and a questionable background--be allowed into presidential press conferences? Talon News was connected to GOPUSA, an organization run by Texas-based Republican activist Bobby Eberle, and Gannon/Guckert routinely asked softball questions of Bush's press secretaries during their daily White House briefings.

Ari Fleischer's answer, when asked how many Democrats supported a bipartisan bill was, "I'm not aware of any more than one" (turns out the the one was Zell Miller).  Well, the right-wing shills in the media have learned how to play that game. 

Andrew Sullivan gets it incredibly wrong:

I haven't written about it because I agree completely with Glenn. The substantive case against Gannon is trivial; the irrelevant case against him (the one that's fueled this story) is that he's gay, has allegedly been (or still may be) a prostitute, and may not agree with everything the gay left believes (although I agree with David Corn that the evidence that Gannon has written anything even remotely "anti-gay" is laughable). The real scandal is the blatant use of homophobic rhetoric by the self-appointed Savonarolas of homo-left-wingery. It's an Animal Farm moment: the difference between a fanatic on the gay left and a fanatic on the religious right is harder and harder to discern. Just ask yourself: if a Catholic conservative blogger had found out that a liberal-leaning pseudo-pundit/reporter was a gay sex worker, had outed the guy as gay and a "hooker," published pictures of the guy naked, and demanded a response from a Democratic administration, do you think gay rights groups would be silent? They'd rightly be outraged. But the left can get away with anything, can't they? Especially homophobia.

Wow, that last bit is rich coming from a gay conservative.  Though Sullivan claims to detest social conservatives, he still dances with them what brung him.  His unholy alliance with the militantly anti-gay party in American politics has certainly undermined his own cause, and seems to have colored his judgement about who the homophobes are.  But let's examine the important bit:

Just ask yourself: if a Catholic conservative blogger had found out that a liberal-leaning pseudo-pundit/reporter was a gay sex worker, had outed the guy as gay and a "hooker," published pictures of the guy naked, and demanded a response from a Democratic administration, do you think gay rights groups would be silent?

First of all, I'm tired of this "published pictures" lie.  The pictures were there.  Gannon put them there.  It's his own damn fault. 

But to answer Sully's question, no, they probably wouldn't be silent.  But they certainly wouldn't mount the full-throated defense of of Gannon that the right has.  They would admit that he "made mistakes" and try to distance themselves from him.  Then they'd ask that we move on. 

But of course, Sully has the relevant comparison wrong.  I'm not all that interested in what gay rights groups would do, because first of all, gay rights groups have very little influence in this country.  (They don't have a real mainstream media presence, and Sullivan doesn't even name any members of the "gay left.")  I'm more interested in what the conservative media, something that has a great deal influence in this country, would do.  And let's not kid ourselves here.  It would be a year long, 24-hour a day, gay prostitution festival over in Limbaughland.  How do we know this?  Well, we all know that the right has engaged in this sort of thing before; there's nothing they like more than to pretend like they don't care about what they consider to be sexual immorality while talking about it nonstop.  Or was Andrew Sullivan living in a cave in the late 90s?

The real issue, of course, is the right-wing base really does hate homosexuals, and they're not afraid to say so.  Remember the debate over gays in the military?  Remember Tom Coburn?  Remember Alan Keyes?

If there is a real problem with how the left has handled the more sordid aspects of GannyGuck scandal, it's that they haven't been, tactically speaking, ferocious enough.  Many of us on the left still have a conscience, and so we're not going to attack, as such, GannyGuck for being a prostitute.  Which is to say, we might think it's funny, we might enjoy pointing out the irony of a conservative reporter being a gay prostitute, and some might even think that there's something inappropriate about a gay prostitute being in the White House press corps. 

But a lot of us aren't convinced that prostitution should be a crime.  It's something that Heather and I discuss sometimes; I tend towards the "prostitution should be illegal because it exploits women," and she tends towards the "it's going to exist, so let's make sure women have protections."  Neither of our position tendencies have anything to with sexual morality as such.  And in this case, we'd probably both agree that we don't really care what GannyGuck does in his private life.

All of which is to say that I'd be surprised if you actually found someone on the left criticizing GannyGuck for a being a prostitute.  As for Sully's claims about left-wing homophobia, well, that's really hard to fathom. 

The problem with this story, in a way, is that the right isn't smart enough to get it.  They just not listening to what we're actually saying about GannyGuck.  Take Ann Coulter:

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 Web site 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.

Of course, that's just false.  No Democrat or liberal has suggested that anyone should hate gay people.  Coulter either knows that and is intentionally lying or is too stupid to understand it. 

So, to sum up: the left, realizing that this is a story, is hanging onto it.  The right, also realizing that it's a story, is making things up to try to change the story from "gay conservative prostitute in the White House press corps" (and, by extension, "Yet another sordid tale of the Bush admin's manipulation of the media") to "the left-wing is really mean," a la Mary Cheney.

So far I'm not impressed, because I think this story only hurts them in the long run.  But we'll see.

-- Michael

Comments

[Incertus]

It ought to hurt them in the long run, but I have my doubts as to whether it will or not. Here's the reason: Gannon makes the press look just as bad as the White House on this. You can't tell me that a press corps worth its salt wouldn't have outed Gannon as a shill long before this, and yet they all just accepted him without question for two years. This was a huge story sitting right under their noses, and they never once broached it, and that shows them up not only as incompetent, but as being in the bag for the White House (like we didn't know that already). No wonder Peter Jennings has time for UFO stories but can't bring himself to mention the Gannonball.

So big media, knowing that if they withhold coverage to a story, it never becomes a story in any larger sense, decides to cover their collective asses by ignoring it, and the reach of the bloggers, while longer than it has been in the past, is still woefully short even of the reach of cable news on CNBC.

That said, we still need to keep hammering them on it, both the White House and the press, to get this some coverage. Thus far, the majority of newspaper coverage I've seen on this has been on the op-ed pages, but those get pages read regularly, even by people who don't read much of the rest of the paper, so we're extending the story a bit that way as well. Letters to the Editor are still effective ways of reaching an audience, and we need to write them.

[Cheryl]

The salient strategic points seem straightforward.

The right lies like a rug all the time. They drape themselves in pseudo-morality based on religious brainwashing and then adopt their moral stance on the basis of political expediency. If the left hires a gay prostitute to lob soft ball questions to a moronic left-wing president (has there ever been such an animal?), it is immoral and a heinous sin to be hollered from all rooftops. If the right hires a gay prostitute to service George W. Idiot in the same way, it is just an inconvenient oversight that should be forgiven and forgotten. The right offers itself special dispensation all the time.

The left will win no points hollering about this one. I think the true vulnerability of the right lies elsewhere, but so far I am unsure of exactly what to do about it.

Rather than concentrating on the salacious moral stories, we should hammer away on the meat-and-potatoes side of morality.

1 Corinthians 6:18 Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. 19 What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? 20 For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.

This is the oft-misquoted 'body is the temple of the soul' passage. Now besides the fact that Guckert was a prostitute and therefore completely deserving of condemnation as outlined in the Bible, there are plenty of other ways that this theme applies to conservatives.

Who owns the tobacco and alcohol companies? Who legislates in their favor? Who lets polluters off the hook? Who supports nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants? Who makes a fortune from junk food?

Ding! Correct, the right wing. Thanks for playing. Now that this elephant is standing inside the tent with us, is there any way to bring it to its knees before it squashes all of us?

Imagine this MoveOn mid-term campaign advertisement: (background music: 'Body and Soul' by Charlie Parker; foreground camera frame sweeps slowly across industrial skyline of smog and smokestacks; continuous ghostly background frame: famous tobacco and alcohol symbols such as Joe Camel, Budweiser label etc. crossfade from one to another) "The body is the temple of the soul, yet George Bush and his theocratic allies in Congress are polluting our bodies like never before." (foreground camera pans down to a sewage pipe that empties into a narrow drainage channel, then crossfades to a young school child struggling to read simple sentences aloud from a storybook; background cross-fades to a steady stream of fast-food symbols such as golden arches, ping-pong-ball clown face etc.) "Throwing money at testing agencies only distracts us from the reality of malnutrition and environmental pollution." (foreground crossfades to naked deformed Middle Eastern infant with its brain growing outside of its skull; background frame crossfades to a series of depeleted uranium shell casings and burned-out tanks) "Not only that, they are using our tax dollars to do the same to Iraqi children with low-level radiation." (foreground crossfades to Gulf War syndrome rash on the back of an Iraq Chapter 1 veteran; background crossfades to a stream of flag-draped coffins returning from the Middle East) "Even our own troops are suffering from the recklessness and immorality of this administration." (foreground pan right to double amputee vet in wheel chair) "Just how much of this carnage are we willing to put up with?"

(background fades out as foreground crossfades to Bush making one of his incredibly moronic faces) "Now they are bringing prostitutes into the press corps to mislead us about their true agenda." (music fades out as Bush's image rapidly morphs through deliberately unflattering computer-modeled aging) "Theocrats. Bad for the body. Bad for the soul."

The message is there. All we need to do is stay on topic.

[DavidByron]

Coulter either knows that and is intentionally lying or is too stupid to understand it

Well which is it Michael? Seems pretty damn obvious to me.

[Incertus]

Of course it's obvious--Coulter's a liar. The only real question is an existential one--if Coulter is batshit crazy enough to think that she's not really lying, that she is in fact telling her personal version of the truth, does that mean that she's not a liar and is instead only batshit crazy?

But in the real world, there's little doubt--Coulter's a liar. She does this kind of shit too often, and is corrected publicly too often, to be able to plead ignorance.

[dmeyers]

Micheal,

I am still trying to figure out where the "there" is on this story. I still don't know what has gotten you so riled up about? Here are the issues that keep showing up in stories

1. Guckert was a gay escort/prostitute and had registered domain names to this effect..
---> I don't see how this has anything to do with the story, unless you think there should be some sort of background check on everyone applying for day press passes... So on this point I can't see how it has anything to do with the story

2. Guckert said he worked for Talon News.
---> On this I guess the story is what is considered a "news outfit" and who decides what is a "news outfit" when approving day passes. I don't know. I really never gave much thought to "day press passes". Does the White House have some official rules for issuing "day press passes"? If so I guess it would be interesting to see those rules. It sure would be nice to get a list of all "news" agencies that were issued "day press passes" over the last 2 administrations so we can compare. Why not do some real journalism and see if that list is available. It might shed some light on just what groups/organizations are awarded "day press passes"

3. Guckert writes/asks questions under an assumed name.
---> It is my understanding that he applied for his day pass using his real name. If I am wrong than so be it. The real investigation that should be done is to see if there is a list of EVERY individual who was issued a "day press pass" to see if there are others who write/ask questions under different names. To me this doesn't seem like a big deal especially if the "day pass rules" do not address this issue

4. Guckert asked soft ball, favorable questions, etc.
---> This one is the most interesting. It seems like the White House issues lots and lots of day press passes. Are these people supposed to submit their questions in advance? Just what is the big deal if someone asks a favorable question? Just like if someone asks a totally stupid, false, meaningless question. Are press people going to be forbidden from asking favorable questions? I just don't get it...

5. Was Guckert a "Rove" plant?
---> Black Helicopter stuff. Get some evidence, otherwise this is just crazy conspiracy stuff..

6. Guckert and classified materials..
---> don't know about this but if anyone is given classified material improperly than obviously that is a problem. If that happened than the justice dept should pursue it...

I guess what I am getting at is I still don't see what the big deal about his story is. Can someone please post the "Big Rock" issues that you all seem to see is the problem/story.

[Incertus]

I'm going to reply, dmeyers, not because I think you care, or even that you'll listen, but I suppose because I'm a glutton for punishment.
1. The prostitute part of the story is more important than the gay part of it. The gay part is more salacious than anything else, more so because of the great antipathy much of the Republican party has for homosexuals, but it's the prostitution part of the story that's important. Here's why. You do have to pass some sort of background check to get a press pass, even a day pass, and considering that Guckert had ads up as recently as a few days ago (they may still be up for all I know), it would seem to me that to offer White House access, including the opportunity to question the POTUS, to a practicing prostitute is a serious breach of security.

2. Talon News, it has been shown repeatedly, is not a news organization in any sense of the word. It's a front for GOPUSA. More importantly, Guckert popped up in a daily press briefing before Talon News even existed, as a shill for, you guessed it, GOPUSA. Guckert's experience as a journalist consists of a two day course in "journalism"--I have more experience than that, simply by virtue of the one year I spent as Editorial page editor of my undergraduate college weekly paper, and I doubt I could get a sniff at a White House press pass, especially when experienced newspeople like Maureen Dowd are being denied access.

3. He applied for his press passes under Guckert, but was known in the press room as Gannon--that was his major undoing, by the way, because he was using his prostitute name as his reporters name. How dumb do you have to be? The question here would seem to be one more of seemliness to my mind, but you have to wonder why the people giving the press passes would allow such a practice, and even more importantly, why they would actively participate in it--that's what they did every time they referred to James Guckert as "Jeff," which they did more than once.

4. In the case of the Presidential question, there's no doubt that the question was planned. Presidential press conferences under Bush have long been scripted--both the White House and members of the press have admitted to it. It's largely because Bush can't hold his own under serious questioning and both he and his advisers know it. In the case of McClellan, what makes the most sense is that Guckert was a lifeline for whenever Scotty got dizzy from all the spinning. Were the questions planted or planned? I don't know, but it doesn't really matter who came up with the questions--they were supposed to act as a way for McClellan to change the subject and give him some time to collect himself, and they worked.

5. A Rove plant? Why not? It's not like Rove hasn't done this stuff in the past. I don't have any proof positive that he is, but then again, I've not been on the front lines of this story. Aravosis might have something working, maybe not. We may never know for certain. But one thing is certain--he was a GOP plant. Whether he was Rove's baby or someone else's, he was certainly in the hire of the GOP through his connection to GOPUSA.

6. It's awfully easy for you to say "if anyone is given classified material improperly than obviously that is a problem. If that happened than the justice dept should pursue it..." when you know that the only people with the ability to fully investigate this are controlled by the people with the most to lose by any investigation.

If you don't see the story now, dmeyers, then you're beyond help.

[Cheryl]

I think the real story is so far not even touched upon.

People are routinely being stripsearched (or close to it) before boarding airplanes now. Some people have had their genitals probed in the process.

How the holy fucking christ can anyone in their right mind suggest that it makes no difference what kind of investigation is used to determine who is safe to sit within a few yards of the President of the United States?

That is, unless the whole Department of Fatherland Security thing is a sham to terrify the populace and no one in the White House really cares that much about security in the first place.

So which is it, dmeyers? Is security important enough to justify an investigation, or is the whole Fatherland Security thing just fascism bordering on Nazism?