Get ready for more about Jeff Gannon.
The next issue of Vanity Fair will include the magazine's piece on the reporter sometimes known as Jim Guckert. And as Howard Kurtz reports in the Washington Post, it will reveal that Gannon's seedy past wasn't exactly a secret to some in Washington: Tom Daschle's campaign staff apparently learned about Gannon's gay sex Web sites while Gannon was pounding on Daschle during his unsuccessful re-election race in 2004. Vanity Fair says that Daschle's campaign spread the word about Gannon, but that no reporters picked up on the story then.
We haven't heard from Gannon yet on this news, but we're sure we will soon enough: Not a day goes by without Jeff Gannon taking time to offer his views about the news about Jeff Gannon at jeffgannon.com. But if you just can't wait to hear more from the man himself, you can check out the video clip of Gannon's appearance on Bill Maher's show Friday night. The highlight? When Maher asked Gannon whether it was true that he worked as a gay escort before becoming the White House reporter for Talon News, Gannon offered a classic non-denial denial. "Well, there's lot of allegations out there about things in my past," he said. "You know, none of it's relevant as far as my reporting goes." But when Maher pressed on, asking Gannon whether Republicans wouldn't have split a seam if the Clinton administration had allowed a former prostitute into the White House briefing room, Gannon came awfully close to making what sounded like an admission. "I don't know the answer to that," he said. "But usually the way it works is people prostitute themselves after they become reporters."
-- Tim Grieve
[11:51 EDT, May 2, 2005]
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Bruce Springsteen and Bush's dinosaur
Matt Drudge apparently thinks it's news worthy of his front page: At a concert in Phoenix Saturday night, a reviewer for the Arizona Republic says he heard Bruce Springsteen say, "That's right," after a member of the audience shouted out, "Fuck the president!"
We were at the show Saturday night -- War Room is everywhere -- and we didn't quite catch the exchange the reviewer reports. We're not saying it didn't happen. We heard the fan shout out his salute to the commander in chief; we just couldn't make out what Springsteen said, if anything, in response. But if Springsteen did adopt the fan's comments as his own, it shouldn't have surprised anyone. Springsteen appeared alongside John Kerry in the final days of his run against Bush, and he made it perfectly clear that he was dissatisfied with the direction in which the president was taking the country.
True, Springsteen did it with more eloquence than invective back in the fall. But if it's the personal epithet that has Drudge and some Republican fans at Springsteen's Web site so hot and bothered -- an epithet, we should note, with which the White House is not unfamiliar -- they can find a better source for their angst than whatever it was that Springsteen said to the fan Saturday night. Introducing "Part Man, Part Monkey" in Phoenix, Springsteen railed on the Bush administration for questioning evolution while embracing "contributions," "executions" and "retribution." At the end of that riff, we heard Springsteen himself deliver what appeared to be a message to the president: "Fuck you, Elvis, and the dinosaur you rode in on, too."
-- Tim Grieve
[10:20 EDT, May 2, 2005]
Mandate? What mandate?
This just in: When George W. Bush beat John Kerry in November by less than three percentage points, it might have been something less than a sweeping endorsement of the political agenda advanced by the president and his allies on the religious right.
In a front-page analysis piece today, the Washington Post's John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei tut-tut "campaign strategists and academics" who once engaged in "ample speculation that Bush's victory, combined with incremental gains in the Republican congressional majority, signaled something fundamental: a partisan and ideological 'realignment' that would reshape politics over the long haul."
Now, say Harris and VandeHei, some political analysts believe it's "just as likely that Washington is witnessing a happens-all-the-time phenomenon -- the mistaken assumption by politicians that an election won on narrow grounds is a mandate for something broad."
Who would make such a "mistaken assumption" about a Republican mandate? Well, one might start with the Washington Post. Before all the votes were even counted on the night of the election, Harris wrote an analysis piece for the Post headlined, "For Bush and GOP, a Validation." In it, he said that "voters in an age of terrorism seemed to let go of their 1990s preference for divided government and gave a narrow but unmistakable mandate for the GOP." VandeHei was only a little more cautious. In an analysis published two days after the election, VandeHei and the Post's Dana Milbank wrote that Bush "heads into a second term with a clearer mandate and greater power than he did in 2000 to put a conservative, free-market stamp on U.S. domestic and foreign policy."
As Harris and VandeHei write today's Post, "If Bush has misjudged the public appetite for an ambitious conservative agenda, he is not the only one."
-- Tim Grieve
[09:55 EDT, May 2, 2005]
Is this the man who made Microsoft quiver?
Bill Gates said the other day that he was surprised by the visibility that Microsoft's flip-flop on gay rights was getting. Now he can be surprised that it isn't going away. The press coverage has continued and spread; local business sections that missed the story the first time around are starting to pick it up, and today both the New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer offer up profiles of the evangelical minister who claims to be responsible for forcing Microsoft to go soft on a Washington state gay rights bill.
Although Microsoft says that it decided to switch from supporting the bill to being neutral on it before a company official first met with the Rev. Ken Hutcherson, the circumstantial evidence and Hutcherson himself all suggest otherwise. Asked if he thought that he alone could have changed the position of the world's largest software company, Hutcherson told the Times: "I don't think. I know. If I got God on my side, what's a Microsoft? What's a Microsoft? It's nothing."
Microsoft has been accused of a certain hubris over the years, but it's got nothing on Hutcherson. The former NFL linkebacker tells the Times: "I want to be to Christianity what Gretzky was to hockey, what Beckham is to soccer, what Jordan was to basketball, what Martin Luther King was to African-American rights, what the Pope was to Poland. I want to be that to Christianity."
To be a real Christian, Hutcherson tells the Post-Intelligencer, you've got to oppose gay marriage. Those who don't are "evangelly-fish," he says, because they lack a "spiritual backbone."
Activists for gay rights tried to attend Hutcherson's services in Redmond, Wash., Sunday, but some were forced to remove rainbow-colored wristbands and sit in an area separate from the church's usual worshippers. "When you're in the battle, it's not time for 'nice,'" Hutcherson says. "It's time to win."
A spokesman for Microsoft apparently felt the need to distance itself from the good reverend. "We respect Dr. Hutcherson's right to his beliefs and opinions," Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray told the Times, "but he does not speak for Microsoft, and he certainly does not set Microsoft's legislative agenda."
-- Tim Grieve
[08:45 EDT, May 2, 2005]
The broken chain of command
It's been a year since evidence of torture by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib shocked the world and made the name of the prison a permanent stain on America's reputation. Perry Jefferies, a former Army sergeant who served in Iraq and now works with Operation Truth, a nonpartisan advocacy group for veterans, weighs in on how far we haven't come since then. Including the fact that, to date, only a few foot soldiers have been held accountable.
"It has been a year now since the first photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib were published. For some, this might be seen as a low point in the war in Iraq, but to me, it was an arbitrary point in a travesty that predated the publication of the photos and seems to have continued since. In the passing year, we’ve found the abuse was systematic, widespread and -- if not authorized -- then at least encouraged by official policies and statements from high-level military and civilian officials. We also find that the leaders who helped set up and continue the torture were rewarded, promoted or absolved, while some of the troops involved are headed for long jail sentences.
"As a soldier, now retired, who was on the ground and was often charged with handling detainees around the same time that these photos were taken, I still find myself amazed, disgusted and frustrated with the manner with which this was dealt. I love the Army, and as a member of several veterans' groups, I frequently find myself in conversations with civilians about our men and women in uniform and the conduct of the war in Iraq. ...
"What leads to the greatest frustration for me is the total abdication of responsibility and lack of accountability from the senior leaders and chain of command. I am accustomed to the public misunderstanding the circumstances and actions of soldiers, and their tendency to turn away when faced with difficult situations. Not so with the leaders of the military. This leaves a dirty smear on the honorable service of so many thousands of soldiers, Marines and others. It puts our men and women of the armed forces squarely in the sights of those who plan to exact revenge or exercise similar care, should they become the captors. The photos from Abu Ghraib insure that the depredations there will not be forgotten, but our government's actions since seem designed to insure it will be neither prevented nor avoided in the future."
-- Mark Follman
[19:35 EDT, April 29, 2005] |
