The June
Vanity Fair article on Jim Guckert/Jeff Gannon is
available online in Adobe Acrobat format. It's a bit of a pain to read (scroll down, scroll up) but the Nigel Parry photos are there for your enjoyment--or unease (Guckert was styled by Ann Caruso and groomed by Frankie Sanderson).
Written by David Margolick and Richard Gooding, this eight-page expose has little new dish for those Kossacks playing the home game of Hot Military Studs, and raises far more questions than answers. Surprise: Guckert doesn't dispute their take on his gayness (and doesn't admit to it either).
SusanG and NYBri, as in ePluribus Media, make appearances as well.
Gannon refuses to discuss his own sexual orientation, though he quotes approvingly from a column by Ann Coulter, who wrote, "Unlike[former New York Times executive editor Howell] Raines, Rather and Jordan, Gannon has appeared on television and given a series of creditable interviews in his own defense, proving our gays are more macho than their straights."
Bigger surprise: He cops to not being a Marine, but now claims he never said he was:
"People were making assumptions because I have a lot of paraphernalia," he says. "And I didn't disabuse anybody of that notion."
Disappointment: Margolick and Gooding dispute claims made on Kos and AmericaBlog without supporting evidence:
The deeper the bloggers dug, though, the shallower Gannon seemed to become; the more they tried to build him up, the more he seemed to shrink. He gained access to the White House under the name Guckert, not Gannon, scotching any ideas of deception. He appears to have met Karl Rove only once--at the same White House Christmas party where he posed for a "grip and grin" picture with the president and the First Lady. For all his purported inside ties, he broke almost no stories. Gannon did not obtain a secret memo in the case of Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. agent illegally identified in the press, as he insinuated in one of his articles; he'd read about it in The Wall Street Journal. He did not have advance word of the American bombing of Iraq. He scarcely knew Ari Fleischer and, apart from sending Scott McClellan a card when he got married, had little personal contact with him. Nor did he have some sort of extra-curricular relationship with Senator Joe Biden, though he'd suggested as much on his Web site. [Emphasis mine]
Vanity Fair don't address Guckert's logged visit to the White House the same day as the Iraq bombing story broke, or his crowing about it on his blog. The only story they'll credit the Fake Marine for advancing is some of the Thune talking points against Tom Daschle in the 2004 South Dakota senate race. Where did they get this information, from the Mr. Reliable being profiled?
And VF dissembles on the deception issue; the problem isn't Guckert's deception of the White House security process, but the Bush administration allowing him to play reporter, lobbing up softball questions, under a fake name. The VF article covers Guckert's desire to change his monicker, but never do the writers ask (or research) whether Guckert changed it legally.
And the questions they didn't ask, or at least didn't report they'd asked: Who is paying Guckert's bills these days? Why did he copy White House press releases and submit them under his byline? How about the plagiarized article? And didn't Vanity Fair have terrible timing, missing the Secret Service logs showing Guckert's extended White House visits?
And here's an interesting phrase from Guckert, aka The Conservative Guy (website now defunct):
"I leave things in my wake. I have such a short attention span. I just like to move on, move on,
move on."