THIS MODERN WORLD

Obviously, the point is not that Gannon/Guckert is gay.

The point is that a fake journalist working for a fake news website, who was apparently leading a double life — allegedly even running an illegal business — somehow gained access to one of the most secure facilities on the face of the planet, under a fake name, in order to ask fake questions the White House wanted asked during press conferences.

You don’t get into the White House by showing up and flashing a press pass that you Photoshopped together and had the local copy shop laminate. And you certainly don’t get into the White House briefing room by virtue of working for a freshly minted partisan website, unless you are very well connected. The point is, the White House and/or its surrogates really shouldn’t be in the business of inventing fake news agencies in order to manipulate public opinion. But they were, and they got caught. (…and it should go without saying that this goes waaaay beyond the “tradition” we’ve heard so much about lately of making sure you’ve got a friendly journalist in the audience. Fox News wasn’t friendly enough, for chrissakes?)

Gannon/Guckert’s alleged porn sites and “escort” activities are relevant in that they highlight the utter incompetence of the administration — somebody somehow thought it would be a bright idea to use this guy, and nobody bothered to vet him to see if they were going to end up with egg on their faces. Any right winger who pretends that G/G worked for a legit news agency and is simply the innocent victim of a gay witch hunt is either too stupid to tie his own shoes in the morning, or is breathtakingly dishonest. No third choice.

(some editing)

One of the items a generous reader purchased off my wish list never arrived. I can’t seem to get a reply via your normal channels. Please contact me so we can sort this out.

Update: Okay, so I heard from Amazon…apparently some idiot there shipped the wish list item to the purchaser, rather than to me. And they now say there’s nothing to be done. Of course, there was no way for me to ever know any of this, since the item in question (the book City: Urbanism and its End) still shows on the ‘purchased’ list. So, to the person who bought this for me — they claim the book was shipped to you. So either you have a book you didn’t want or you’ve had to hassle with sending it back. In any case, I apologize for the headache. And unless somebody at Amazon gets this straightened out, like, today, and gets this book in the mail to me, I’m pulling the wish list, as well as the affiliate link, off this site. I don’t care what your standard policy is. You screwed up. Fix it.

I’ve spent enough time on this today — I’m still trying to get this week’s cartoon written. But several people have passed along Amazon’s deliberately hard-to-find customer service number, which may be useful to some of you: 1-800-201-7575.

The Gannon story just gets weirder and weirder.

UPDATE: link was dead for awhile. Seems to be working now.

So in the end, why does this matter? Why does it matter that Jeff Gannon may have been a gay hooker named James Guckert with a $20,000 defaulted court judgment against him? So he somehow got a job lobbing softball questions to the White House. Big deal. If he was already a prostitute, why not be one in the White House briefing room as well?

This is the Conservative Republican Bush White House we’re talking about. It’s looking increasingly like they made a decision to allow a hooker to ask the President of the United States questions. They made a decision to give a man with an alias and no journalistic experience access to the West Wing of the White House on a “daily basis.” They reportedly made a decision to give him – one of only six – access to documents, or information in those documents, that exposed a clandestine CIA operative. Say what you will about Monika Lewinsky – a tasteless episode, “inappropriate,” whatever. Monika wasn’t a gay prostitute running around the West Wing. What kind of leadership would let prostitutes roam the halls of the West Wing? What kind of war-time leadership can’t find the same information that took bloggers only days to find?

The history of American intervention in the Middle East is largely a history of unintended consequences. Backing the Shah of Iran set into motion a sequence of events which led more or less directly to 9/11. And, well, once again it looks as if things may not work out as well as the strategists and visionaries might have hoped:

When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran’s theocracy — potentially even a foil to Tehran’s regional ambitions.

But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base — and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy — $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.

Power surge in my neighborhood last night seems to have fried my cable modem, so I’m mostly offline today. Almost certainly won’t be posting anything new here.

Update: back online, but swamped.