Where Gannon and Rove intersect

Some of the best writing on Jeff Gannon's possible role in Plame-gate can be found in the resurrected Is Bush Wired? blog (not to be confused with BushWired, which I mentioned yesterday. The headlines are pretty damned clever -- "The Rove That Dare Not Speak Its Plame," "Rove's Other Dummy" -- and the analysis is pretty juicy.

The main thesis: Rove and Gannon have a closer relationship than most suspect, and Rove (or an underling) may even be writing Gannon's blog. The argument hinges Gannon's history of plagiarism, which speaks to an inability to articulate his own thoughts. Yet in his blog, "Gannon" occasionally displays an uncanny ability to express Rove's POV, using very Rovian terminology. Here's Gannon:

"Like most conservatives, I have grown weary of how the Democrats continue to assert their relevance in governance when voters have removed them from power and reduced their numbers in three successive elections...When you peel away the top layer of beltway bloviation, the brilliant strategy becomes easier to see...If you view political strategy as war, as I am sure Karl Rove does, the Miers pick makes perfect sense....She will be confirmed, probably as easily as John G. Roberts... When conservatives stop to think about it, they will be comforted by what Bush has achieved. He will have delivered the Court he promised, without the political bloodshed everyone assumed would take place. A principle of Sun-Tzu is to have won the war before the first shot is fired."

We know that Rove had a huge (probably decisive) hand in the pick. And the reference to Sun-Tsu sounds like classic Rove. I can't really picture the he-ho reading such a work.

In past posts ,I have written about the mystery of the secret State Department memo which may or may not have been leaked to Gannon. (Fitzgerald, I understand, has been looking into that angle.) IBW has an interesting take on this controversy:

Gannon may or may not have seen the memo; his answers about it have been contradictory, and the date of the interview hasn't been reported. But even assuming that his only knowledge of the memo was from an October 17, 2003 Wall Street Journal article that discussed it, how was it that Gannon first came to pursue the interview with Wilson?

Reporters and bloggers at Daily Kos, E Pluribus Media and BecomingGannon have suggested that Gannon was created as a GOP operative, originally to aid the Iraq propaganda effort. Gannon first appeared in the White House briefing room early in 2003, even before Talon News had been created. (Neither Talon News nor GOPUSA, the group that created it, was paying Gannon at the time, according to Talon's subsequent application for a Congressional press pass for Gannon.)...

He was on to the Wilson-Plame story early. On July 24, 2003, ten days after the Robert Novak column outing Plame was published, Gannon launched his own blog with a denunciation of the media for asking questions about the leak, which he said amounted to trying to make Bush into "George W. Nixon."

Later:

Tex MacRae, in the BecomingGannon blog, lays out a possible sequence of events in which the classified memo was handed around town by Grover Norquist (at whose exclusive Wednesday gatherings Gannon was a frequent presence by early 2003, if not before). MacRae speculates that it was Norquist who told Gannon to interview Wilson in the hope of deriving information that could be used to discredit him.

My bet is that it was Rove who set Gannon in motion on the Wilson interview, whether directly or through Norquist. The published interview reads in part as an effort in scandal control: to find out exactly what Wilson knew about who was behind the leak, what he knew about Rove's involvement in particular, and to learn the names of journalists who had spoken to Wilson about the leak.

Sorry to quote at such length from another blogger, but I believe that these observations deserve a wider audience.

I'll add only two points:

1. Gannon's tax debt makes him quite easily manipulated.

2. Regarding the question why the cabal chose this man, I think we must presume that someone in the White House appreciated Gannon's, er, non-literary professional skills. How else could he gain entry?