Let’s face it, Jeff Gannon was a man-whore with a thing for service personnel, he had naked pics of himself on the website he used to promote his man-whoring, pics that showed “Gannon’s cannon” and the White House was using him as a fake reporter.
I know why the liberal left didn’t raise a stink about this: their beef was with his fakery as a newsman, not his gayness or whorishness. But what about the social conservatives who have backed Bush to the hilt even when he substitutes promises for action wrt their agenda? Why weren’t they screaming about Gannon’s sexuality and lifestyle? Are they REALLY that besotted with Bush, that they just pass over the repeated use of man whore for a very public function by his administration? I mean, isn’t this kinda close to be found in bed with a male hooker?
Is there some evidence that the White House colluded with Mr. Gannon, as opposed to simply using an known friendly questioner?
In other words, do we know that they KNEW he was a gay man whore, as you so charmingly put it? Or did they simply know he was a ready source for metaphorical kissing ass, as opposed to literal?
Read. Been through this here already, both of you. The conservative-partisan response to the OP, going by Bricker’s statement, is that only smoking-gun evidence, not circumstantial evidence, is sufficient to shake their faith. Anything short of that and it’s just another Dem smear.
Wasn’t this a one or two week wonder in February? Did the OP just find out about it, or is there some recent news that I haven’t seen? And what I get out of Bricker’s post is that what has been reported is that the press secretary knew that Gannon could be counted on to ask easy questions, as well as Gannon’s not very well hidden other life, but there’s no evidence that the White House knew about the other life. The whole thing seemed pretty pointless to me at the time. Did Gannon’s presence at news conferences actually help the administration, or make any difference at all?
And the left-wing-partisan response, going by your OP, is that gay people are bad and need to be condemned if they refuse to toe the party line.
Isn’t it a little disingenous to say “he’s a man-whore, but my side doesn’t condemn him for that”? If you aren’t condemning him, why do you bring it up?
I’ve never seen that the lefties hereabouts have any problems generating hysterics. Why do you need our help with it?
Hmmm. Doesn’t jibe with what I know of social conservatives’ readiness to believe a sexual smear. Could be that politically partisan social conservatives may well have used Rove’s characteristic “at one remove” approach to political monkey business as a convenient set of blinders to allow them to continue to associate Bush with the sort of people who don’t associate with the sort of people Gannon is. I just don’t see this working for less partisan social conservatives. Shouldn’t they have been crying to the heavens to learn what the White House knew about Gannon and when it knew it? Certainly, many of them leant their support to the Clinton blowjob impeachment. If you compare the howling that went on over the Clinton blowjob with the Gannon affair’s tepid response, you’ll see a notable difference.
No, I wrote the OP because it had been awhile since the events cited in the OP and I was just wondering why no hue and cry about it.
Your point about the question of Gannon’s not very will hidden other life is well taken, but I should think if there had been an outraged conservative citizenry out there, cries for a thorough investigation of what the White House knew about Gannon, and when they knew it, would have been loud and long. And they weren’t either of those things.
I was careful to use the term “social conservative” as opposed to “conservative” because there are several stripes of conservative who are not all that intolerant of sexual lifestyles, frex libertarians and Log Cabin Republicans. And while I would be the FIRST to admit that most of the hue and cry about Clinton’s blowjob sprang from naked political partisanship, I also believe that the Pubbies responsible for it were counting on the enthusiastic support of many social conservatives. I am also under the impression that social conservatives generally are much more averse to gay stuff than to heterosexual fooling around. Or maybe those huge numbers rejecting gay marriage meant something else …
**Evil Captor ** - I can answer your OP, speaking only for myself. The fact that Gannon was involved in whatever sexual escapades didn’t bother me because he didn’t matter to me. The fact that he had access to White House press conferences on shaky grounds, and that he was perceived to have been trying to help Bush and his press secretary was mildly and briefly interesting to me; mildly because IMO he didn’t make any difference with his softball questions, and briefly because the sex scandal made him go away pretty quickly. If the White House deliberately and knowingly conspired with this guy to credential him despite his vulnerability to being outed, that was pretty dumb. If they deliberately helped credential him to use him, but without any knowledge of his other life, they must think that softball questions are more valuable than I think they are.
That link offers me two paragraphs and rthen requires registration.
Those two paragraphs don’t seem to offer all that much in the way of compelling circumstantial evidence.
By the way: “smoking gun” evidence IS circumstantial evidence. The phrase refers to a classic definition of circumstantial evidence: you hear a shot, and open the door to see a man holding a smoking gun, standing over a dead body with a prominent bullet wound.
That’s not direct evidence. It’s strong circumstantial evidence that permits you to reach inferences.
I would classify myself as conservative and Christian. You are probably right about most social conservatives and Christians feeling more strongly about homosexuality than adultery, for instance, but I’m not one of them. My religious beliefs tell me that sin is sin, an offense against God, and I don’t see much sense in the idea that there is a hierarchy of egregiousness, although many of my fellow believers disagree with me. For a number of reasons, what Clinton did with Lewinski was morally repugnant to me, but was worthy of scandal, not government action. His perjury, if that’s what it legally was, was not, IMO, worthy of impeachment. I remember being frustrated at the time that there didn’t seem to be an available, appropriate legal sanction for the perjury. The impeachment was just partisan crap. For what it’s worth, I make a huge distinction between the actions of the president and the actions of a peripheral supporter of the president.
If by that you mean that gayness should not be cover for getting up to the hijinks Gannon does, sure thing. 'Course his problem wasn’t so much being a conservative as being an obvious shill for McClellan. Even so, I got nothing wrong with attacking gays who are conservative – I have often called gay Republicans fools because that is my honest opinion of them. I wouldn’t attack them for being gay, but for supporting an organization that’s pretty much out to get them.
Not at all. But thanks for bringing it up. I suspect that some Dems and liberals might have been silent on the point precisely because they feared someone might use a line like this against them. Doesn’t bother me … it’s obvious that this is the sort of thing that should send social conservatives screaming to the barricades, yet it hasn’t, it’s reasonable to ask why.
Let’s just nip this one in the bud. Social conservatives didn’t go after Gannon because he wasn’t hurting their cause. Had he been a liberal reporter trying to trash Bush, Gannon’s political corpse would have been picked clean by the vultures on the right.
And it happens on both sides of the political spectrum so let’s not trot out that tired old canard of IOKIYAR, because IOKIYAD, too. If you want to say the Republicans do this sort of thing more or better, fine. I don’t know if that can be proven or not, but it might be true. It does seem that the Republicans are more organized and disciplined about this type of thing. But since both sides **do **employ the same tactics, and this is politics afterall, one has to ask oneself whether that represents a strenght of a weakness on the part of the Democrats.
Let’s just nip this one in the bud. Social conservatives didn’t go after Gannon because he wasn’t hurting their cause. Had he been a liberal reporter trying to trash Bush, Gannon’s political corpse would have been picked clean by the vultures on the right.
And it happens on both sides of the political spectrum so let’s not trot out that tired old canard of IOKIYAR, because IOKIYAD, too. If you want to say the Republicans do this sort of thing more or better, fine. I don’t know if that can be proven or not, but it might be true. It does seem that the Republicans are more organized and disciplined about this type of thing. But since both sides **do **employ the same tactics, and this is politics afterall, one has to ask oneself whether that represents a strenght of a weakness on the part of the Democrats.