Genius, Baby!


The ties between prostitute turned White House Correspondent Jeff Gannon and Senior Bush Advisor Karl Rove are receiving wider attention in the blogosphere and mainstream media this morning.
Gannon’s foreknowledge of 2003’s Shock and Awe operation, reported exclusively yesterday on AmericaBlog.org, is highly suggestive that the political operative’s mentor is a significant player in the upper reaches of the Bush administration.
According to an on line column by a woman described as a “Senior Political Editor for CBS News”:

Rove's dominance of White House and Republican politics…make it hard to believe that he [Gannon] wasn't at least implicitly sanctioned by the "boy genius”…[Gannon] was a player in Republican campaigns and his work in the South Dakota Senate race illustrates the role he played.

The highly interesting Nashua Advocate advances the plausible idea that mentor and mentee initially met through the auspices of Morton C. Blackwell’s Youth Leadership School, the home of the infamous $50 2-day journalism seminar.
The Advocate quotes the organizations’ glossy YouthLeadership.org web site:

On a weekly basis our interns meet with some of the conservative movement's top 'movers and shakers’… From Congressmen to Supreme Court Justices to heads of major public policy groups, interns receive personal mentoring.

As a service to the busy power conservative, the Youth Leadership School also maintains a job bank for its eager, aggressive graduates to more easily hook a born-again political sugar daddy:

Resumes arrive within 24 hours, so you can begin to fill open positions immediately. Our prospective candidates can fill every position from chief-of-staff to press secretary.

The informative and amusing Advocate snarks:

Wow! Are you saying you can find a high-priced gay prostitute with an eerie military fetish to pose for more than two years as a credible White House "journalist" in less than twenty-four hours?

But as a Lincoln contemporary once described the 16th President’s male sleeping companions so Jeff Gannon dismissed reports of his X-rated web sites as "so much … stuff" in his second semi-tell-kinda-all tête á tête with corduroy-wearing Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz.
The truth-impaired former male prostitute, fresh from his timorous eye-shifting session with CNN’s aggressive cutie-pie Anderson Cooper last evening, tells Howie that reports of White House coddling and friendships are:

"Absolutely, completely, totally untrue”… "I have no friendships with anyone there.”

It seems that this coordinated end of week effort by someone powerful enough to trot out the tongue-loosened Gannon, a Press Secretary or two and even a President in a brief, non-Gannon and under-reported February 17th Q&A has failed to stem the tide of the GannonGate tsunami.

1998 Leesberg, VA Christmas party

For example, Jeff Gannon’s attendance at a 1998 suburban Washington Christmas sex orgy, reported yesterday by the Washington Blade, wasn’t the only festive holiday event attended by the prostitute turned reporter over the last several years.
Last evening, MediaMatter.org drew wider attention to overlooked implications stemming from statements Gannon made as the scandal was first breaking on the internet during his February 11th Editor & Publisher interview:

"I only met Karl Rove once, at the media Christmas party at the White House in 2003. I was waiting in line for my 'grip and grin' with the president and he passed by. I introduced myself to him, he said hello, and he moved on.” He said he also attended the 2004 Christmas party.

As Media Matters points out, the White House Press Secretary plays a “significant role in arranging the guest list for the Christmas parties" and offers examples of this fact and the staff intensity focused upon the guest list from press reporting during the first Bush presidency, the Clinton presidency and the current Bush occupation of the White House:

From 1992- “Some national correspondents… have apparently been unceremoniously axed from the annual White House Christmas party list. ... Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, who's said to be wielding the ax for the half-dozen gigs, didn't return a call."

From 1995-“The season takes a toll… 'It's 16- to 18-hour days for a month…'Now everyone can turn to their personal Christmas.'"

From 2002-“Fleischer offered to have [the] manager of the White House press office, work as a clearinghouse to sort invitations [to the White House Correspondents Dinner]… the invitation task was not as bad as the job she had in December of overseeing the invitations to the White House Christmas party”

The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin (scroll down to "Turned Away" and "Kicked Out"), just yesterday in an on line posting, offered evidence that this White House is still meticulous in "grooming" lowly but possibly irksome attendees from the President's faux Social Security Town Hall Meetings:

Before the band finished 'Hail To The Chief,' a squad of Portsmouth cops swooped in to unceremoniously 'escort' this 52-year-old guy with a bad leg and a hole in his liver out of the hangar and halfway across the parking lot.

Images: AP, AmericaBlog.org, Washington Blade
- posted by Sean @ 9:36 AM