Losing Track of the Hypocrisy

Sometimes you just can’t follow the distortion and hypocrisy in a story – it’s piled so deep!

Jeff Gannon, the former White House “reporter” for the “Talon News Service,” an offshoot of a GOP group, and whose naked pictures have appeared on a number of gay escort sites, says that he has "regrets" about his past but that White House officials knew nothing about his former activities.  This doesn’t begin to address how he actually got the access to ask questions although it is widely suspected that GOP operatives pulled strings so that Jeff Gannon (real name James Dale Guckert) could toss softball queries to Scott McClellan or George W. Bush himself at press conferences.  The strings were pulled, the background check was avoided and voila: Mr. Guckert becomes Mr. Gannon and the Bushites always know who they can point to when the questioning gets tough!

Gannon complained in an interview with the Washington Post, "Why would they be looking into a person's sexual history?  Is that what we're going to do to reporters now?  Is there some kind of litmus test for reporters?  Is it right to hold someone's sexuality against them?"  Of course, Gannon is complaining about “liberals,” not those who people are actually trying to limit his civil rights by changing the Constitution.

Continuing this misdirected anger he offered that, "People have said some of my writing expressed a hostile point of view" toward gays.  "These people are willing to abandon their principles on the basis of trying to make me out to be a hypocrite.  These are the same groups that cherish free speech and privacy."

Huh?  Gay activists should embrace hypocritical gays?  Is that what he’s saying?

One gay activist noted that Gannon is now guilty of "what I call family-values hypocrisy.  Basically, he's asking the gay community to protect him when he attacks us."

Gannon has not disputed evidence that he has advertised himself as a $200-an-hour gay escort but would not specifically address such questions.

Yet, in reporting on comments by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) that legalizing gay marriage could lead to judicial approval of bestiality, Gannon made an issue of the fact that the Associated Press reporter who interviewed Santorum was married to a top Kerry aide and described the comments of gay activists as "predictable responses."  Gannon said he was not taking a stand on this issue, yet he has not hesitated to bash Democrats, even falsely accusing them of making comments they never made, such as in the cases of Sen. Harry Reid and Sen. Hillary Clinton.

What courage!

In other media related hypocrisy, writers Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher have secretly accepted money from the Bush Administration to promote government programs in their print columns without disclosing this information to readers who may have thought that the columnists had no ulterior motives.

Both writers are openly and publicly pious yet seemed to not know the difference betweensincere opinions and opinions that may have been influenced by cash payments.

This is no shock.  As the clueless Jeff Gannon/James Guckert says, "People criticize me for being a Christian and having some of these questionable things in my past," he said.  "I believe in a God of forgiveness."

And they all believe in cash payments too, I suspect.