I know, I know. It's getting old. Every time you look at DailyKos there's another Gannon story. And some of them are getting weird. "
Is Drudge a Gannon client?" and "
Were Gannon and Bush having an affair" and "Is
the bald guy with Bush in this picture maybe Gannon?"
It's tough to keep it all sane, I know. And some of it has been a little insane, sure, though even the oddest theories have bore fruit down the line. But here's the thing you have to remember... we've got to keep it going.
We can't let this go. And here's why.
THIS STORY IS EXPLODING!
Check it out: Just today (courtesy of Kos' front page story) we have:
- Maureen Dowd going long on Gannon in the NY Times.
- Frank Rich doing likewise in the same paper, same day.
- Sid Blumenthal continuing Salon's coverage of the case.
- The Christian Science Monitor makes mention today.
- The Daily Show did a good third of the show on the case, including shots at the mainstream media for having been schooled on the whole journalism thing by bloggers, and even talk about Gannon's alleged penis size!
- The London Guardian weighed in, giving the story legs across the pond.
Add this to the slow roll of the last few days:
- CourtTV has been going hard on the story, and not puling punches.
- Howie Kurtz backpedalling in the Post and saying, well, maybe this is a story after all.
- CNN's Judy Woodruff gives a begrudging headpat to the bloggers after Wolf Blitzer's initial Gannon-style softballs to the Man-Whore earlier in the week.
- Olbermann has been at it for days, and shows no sign of quitting.
- The smaller papers, like The Niagara Falls Reporter are into the story.
- The Nation ain't letting go.
- Air America? Like attack dogs, ripping Gannon to pieces every day and yelling at the mainstream media for ignoring it all.
It goes on, and on. This story is NOT DYING - rather, it's just now starting to pick up steam. Why? Because WE haven't let it go, and because our fact-checking is good, and because we're handling this the way the Republican noise machine has been handling similar things for years - with persistance and smarts.
Yes, it's tacky to call Gannon a gay prostitute, because who cares if the guy is gay, bi or otherwise? Well, sadly, everyone who voted for Bush cares about who is gay and who isn't, which makes this an issue that matters to the mainstream media. If we want to beat the right wing at the public relations game, we need to understand that sometimes we need to get down to their level and loll in the muck.
Yes, it should matter more that Gannon boasted of having the Plame memo, but you know what? It doesn't. The story here, and the story that has the mainstream media talking despite orders to keep their mouths shut, is that:
A GAY PROSTITUTE WAS WELCOMED INTO THE WHITE HOUSE.
That's the frame. That's the headline. That's where Joe and Jane Nascar wake up from their Fear Factor slumber and say, "Excuse me? Who did you say was gay in the White House?"
When this sort of thing happens to our side, the right are relentless. They STILL push that BS that Clinton was offered Bin Laden three times and refused him, even though it's been disproved ad infinitum. We STILL haven't got an apology from Britt Hume for soiling FDR's fine name and deliberately misquoting him about social security, and you can bet the right wingers will be repeating Hume's lies for months as they try to sell our nesteggs to Wall Street. They know full well that if you repeat a lie enough times, it begins to become fact. Well the same goes for facts, only ten-fold.
We MUST keep talking about Gannon, even when it's boring. We MUST keep asking questions like, "Who was it that decided to give a gay prostitute access to the President?" We must keep saying things like, "Some people say Scott McClellan could have been the link, because he's alleged to be a homosexual... what do you say to that, Ann Coulter?"
We must stay the course. We must keep throwing out theories and hypothesizing and finding things like what was found today, when footage showed Gannon in the Press Corps BEFORE Talon even existed. And we must keep talking trash, keep throwing out 'some people say' lines, keep discussing the 'allegations' that are as yet unproven, just to keep all this in the national consciousness.
No, it isn't classy. Sure, it's unsophisticated and trashy. Absolutely, it would be nice if it didn't have to be this way...
But it's working. The mainstream media MUST talk about it now because we won't stop talking about it, and because we're making them look bad when they stay quiet.
This is where the pendulum swings the other way. This is where the truth becomes currency once more. Keep pushing, keep repeating, keep framing. We're making it happen.
POST-SCRIPT: It seems he Gannon story made the Today Show as well (thanks to the poster below that pointed it out). That, to me, is when the rest of the country starts to follow the leader. Keep pushing!