Transition or Dying Vestige?


Thursday, the convoluted tissue of fibs and half-truths that is GannonGate, enjoyed one of those absurd transitional days in the life of a major modern American political scandal.
This morning, our untelegenic (video file of Today show segment) post millennial Fawn Hall kicked off the festivities by allowing Campbell Brown to semi-nail down his extracurricular web-based personal services:

Brown: You have said that you registered a number of pornographic Web sites. Is that accurate?

Gannon: Well, I registered a number of domain names, that some have suggested are…

Brown: Pornographic Web sites.

Gannon: Well, yes.

Brown: Did you advertise yourself as a gay, male escort for hire on a Web site?

Gannon: I cannot go into those specifics.

Specific-hungry bloggers, also this morning, noticed Mr. G’s hurriedly reworked JeffGannon.com was up, running and spitting cool-to-the-touch milquetoasty faux luminescence:

I developed some good friends there [the White House] who welcomed the refreshing perspective I brought to the briefings.

Also included on JeffGannon.com, along with cliché references to “faith” and crucibles, was another Washington scandal standard:

In [sic] regard to the allegations about my personal life, I have been advised by my attorneys not to comment on any of the details.

It should be noted that someone edited the above statement, which, earlier Thursday, contained this more interesting turn of phrase:

"Per the advice of my highly-paid legal team..."

Anyway our naïf of nookie ultimately doesn’t disappoint as, against the expensive advice of one or more attorneys, he does mention a detail:

A reporter that helped bring the beloved Tom Daschle down.

Sadly for certain highly placed DC hardballers, poor Jim/Jeff just doesn’t know when to stifle it as he again illustrated with an unusual interview given to Gabe Caggiano of the suburban Washington, DC Montgomery and Prince George’s County Sentinal:

"My sinful past will not prevent me from having a future. I am a decent, giving person who has provided comfort and assistance to AIDS victims for over a decade. I am a leader in my Capitol Hill neighborhood responsible for improving the quality of life in a transitional part of the city."

What’s that Jim/Jeff?
Did you say “sinful past” within your paean to urban homosexuality?
Why, whatever did you mean?
Merely registering domain names could hardly be construed as sinful by even the major religious denominations, could it?
But for catspaw Jeff, all fluffer protestations to the contrary, hard news meat finally arrived late Thursday though the impressive web offices and old-fashioned journalism skills of The Nashua Advocate:

Our research has focused on whether a White House news correspondent shared opposition research with staff of U.S. Senator John Thune (R-SD) in a purposeful attempt to discredit a sitting Democratic Senate Minority Leader (Daschle); whether a White House news correspondent lied about his identity to the Daschle campaign in order to get information which would or could be used to discredit them; and whether a White House news correspondent synchronized his news stories in order to have them coincide with the partisan activities of the Thune campaign.
Thus far, all three of these theories/propositions have proven true: the first, Gannon has admitted to the news outlet Editor & Publisher within just the last 72 hours; the second, The Nashua Advocate confirmed with the spokesman for the Daschle campaign; the third, former Thune staffer and current Professor at South Dakota State University, Jon Lauck, has admitted on his publicly-accessible blog.

The writers of The Nashua Advocate sound disheartened.
They have discovered the kernal of illegality within the shit-pile of sexually-charged nonsense.
The entire article, hell their entire blog, makes facinating reading and I would recommend it to your kind attention.
They close, in part, by saying this:

Gannongate is one of the largest, most complicated, and ultimately most invidious scandals Washington has seen in years…It's big, and it's slipping away, just like the last vestiges of courage in the Old Media.

I remain hopeful that truth will out.
This scandal is, indeed, complicated with complications compounded by a purposeful and highly organized disinformation operation.
But, loose gannons abound and even the least sophisticated Attention Deficit Disordered American can focus, because of the salacious sex, long enough to have an honest gut reaction to common everyday lies.
Trash and truth, God willing, are joined hand by hand in a pincer maneuver that just might restore some new non plutocratic digital version of our beloved Old Republic.

Image: M Ryder-The Seattle Times, Daily Kos
- posted by Sean @ 12:06 AM