Gannon explodes

America's most hypocritical he-harlot has escaped the confines of blog-land and has become a mainstream media sensation. How much scrutiny can this scandal withstand before someone uncovers the story behind the story?

I'm becoming a tad irritated by the standard pundit remark: "Why didn't the Secret Service vet this guy?" Obviously, he achieved his position precisely because he was known. Behind Guckert stood someone else -- someone big. (Sorry, but the nature of this scandal makes a few double entendres inevitable.)

And that "someone" obviously had high hopes for our "Bulldog." He was being set up to become a new Hannity, a new O'Reilly.

Are "Gannon"'s politics sincere? I doubt it; this guy was always too scripted. He has lied and lied. He lied about the nature of his websites. He has lied about his name. He lied about religion, bleating in public about his conversion to fundamentalism even as he maintained his call-boy service.

The Guardian claims that "the reporter who wasn't is part of a wider press scandal." Damn straight. (Another unintended pun -- sorry!)

The programmed quality of the rightist media, its Goebbels-esque faithfulness to the party's daily line, has become downright unnerving. How did the con-intern manage to instill such discipline? Right-wing pundits used to act with greater independence. For example, George Will spent much of the Reagan era loudly proclaiming that Americans were undertaxed -- a statement calculated to establish himself as a maverick. His message was: "I may be a conservative, but I am no puppet."

Now, all right-wing pundits seem to take pride in their puppethood. How did this happen?

To come at the question from a different direction: If Gannon was blackmailed into becoming a robot for the RNC (as I suspect he was) then just how widespread is the practice of extortion?

For further evidence that we are dealing with a scandal that goes well beyond a mere security breach, note these emergent sub-stories:

1. A Texas network? A gay writer for Daily Kos traces Guckert's links to a network of closeted Texas Republicans.

What is interesting in tracing the origins of GOPUSA is that Bobby Eberle appears to equivocate about when his organization actually began. Although he most often cites 9-11 as a key to the inspiration to go big time, other reports suggest that GOPUSA was, in fact, founded, in Texas, in 1999. The lead here suggests a strong possibility that Rove needed a "front" group to act as a propaganda arm of the campaign and that the far better connected (though even more dubious financially) Bruce Eberle agreed to help create GOPUSA for his (brother? Cousin? Nephew? - has anyone solved this yet?) Bobby to oversee, or front for.

Is the confusion because GOPUSA was actually created before Bob Eberle had anything much to do with it? That he, too, had been brought on board?

That GOPUSA and TALON news were not just some simple little advocacy group seems highlighted by their role in the South Dakota campaign, of which we already know quite a lot and has been well-documented by SusanG and others.

In summary for today, my hypothesis is that under the able scrutiny of Karl Rove, members of Texas's closety gay underground were brought in to similarly create a dirty tricks arm of the campaign. Most members of GOPUSA probably had no know idea that any of this was happening. That was desirable. The secret leveraged world of gays and espionage neatly overlap. Indeed, gays and networks of gays have long been a staple in the clandestine world for those very reasons.

(For more on the Eberles, see below.) This Kos writer addresses a subject wider than the Gannon scandal; he speaks to the whole history of interaction between spooks and the sexual underground.

My estimation is that a network of Texas Gays have been instrumental in Bush's rise to power and that a few of them just got very sloppy in a way that risks outing all of them. That's the reason why there's been this whole attempt to frame the issue as being about Gannon's personal life -- they know perfectly well it's their OWN personal lives that that they're trying to protect.

Could this posited network have any link to the rumors surrounding Bush's own private life?

(At this point, perhaps I should mention that a reader from Tennessee has hinted that he may be able to confirm reports that former Knoxville mayor Victor Ashe had a hidden life. Ashe, you will recall, was W's roommate and fellow male cheerleader at Yale. Stay tuned!)

2. A connection to Nick Berg? I've written at some length about the theory that Nick Berg, the technician beheaded in Iraq, had a covert history as a spy. Oddly enough, the Berg and Guckert tales overlap.

Guckert interviewed Berg's one-time business partner, Aziz al-Taee, a.k.a. Aziz Kadoory Aziz, a.k.a. Joe Aziz, an anti-Saddam Iraqi who popped up in several right-wing stories in the run-up to the war. I havepreviously noted that this strange individual was also a crook linked to drugs and the Russian mob. His anti-Saddam organization had a West Virginia address and unusual connections to the State department.

Former CIA officials Vince Cannistraro and Graham Fuller were trumpeting Aziz during this period. So was Guckert. Aziz also was tied to GOPAC in this period.

What do "Joe Aziz" and "Jeff Gannon" have in common, aside from a penchant for fake names? They both were very, very open to extortion:

Al-Taee pleaded guilty in the 1990s to selling empty plastic envelopes commonly used to package crack. He also pleaded guilty to buying stolen computers. He was sentenced to three years of probation, fined $3,000, and forced to forfeit $17,673 in profits.

He was arrested again in May 2001, on charges that the chain of electronics stores he owns in Philadelphia was selling counterfeit compact discs. A judge dismissed that case for lack of evidence on March 4. Al-Taee blamed the compact disc counterfeiting case on unscrupulous employees, who he said had acted without his approval.

Further indication, perhaps, that the propaganda business and the blackmail business are interlinked.

(Incidentally, and for what little it may be worth, Jim Guckert and Nick Berg both attended West Chester university.)

3. White House ties? It's increasingly obvious that "Gannon" was not just a pretend-reporter, not just an conservative yes-man -- he was an insider, a trusted individual, part of the team:

San Antonio radio producer Susan Farris could always count on James Guckert, a.k.a. former White House correspondent Jeff Gannon, to pitch an appearance on the shows she produces at conservative talk station KTSA.

He was not only anxious about pushing his story of the day, but seemed to always have some kind of inside knowledge about the White House, as well.

And:

Guckert, she said, frequently passed on what he clearly thought was insider information, during his 12 appearances on KTSA during 2003 and 2004. She first heard from him the expression "shock and awe" to refer to the massive U.S. bombing attack at the start of the Iraq war, and he fingered Mary Mapes as the producer of the so-called "Rathergate" segment on "60 Minutes" before she had seen that mentioned elsewhere.

Gannon devoted much of his "reportage" to smearing Tom Daschle; the campaign manager for John Thune, Daschle's opponent, was Dick Wadham, who is very close to Karl Rove. There are further ties between Gannon and Rove:

More interesting is that he and Karl Rove seem to share a mentor -- a largely under-the-radar wingnut named Morton Blackwell. It seems that "Jeff" also is a graduate of the the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism -- a conservative propagandist training school that was founded and is run by Blackwell and that operates on an $8 million annual budget which comes from God knows where.

A CBS investigator finds even more Gannon/Rove linkage:

But Rove's dominance of White House and Republican politics, Gannon's aggressively partisan work and the ease with which he got day passes for the White House press room the past two years make it hard to believe that he wasn't at least implicitly sanctioned by the "boy genius." Rove, who rarely gave on-the-record interviews to the MSM (mainstream media), had time to talk to GOPUSA, which owns Talon.

GOPUSA and Talon are both owned by Bobby Eberle, a Texas Republican and business associate of conservative direct-mail guru Bruce Eberle who says that Bobby is from the "Texas branch of the Eberle clan."

Which leads us directly to our next point of interest...

4. Eberle. Who is Bobby Eberle, and how was he able to muscle a guy like Guckert into the White House? For the full background, read this fine RAW story piece. Many pieces of the puzzle still need to be filled in -- for example, we have oddly conflicting accounts as to whether Bobby and Bruce Eberle are related.

Odder still: Bush claims he never met Bobby Eberle. Texas Republican officials also take a "Bobby who?" stance. Yet there is evidence that the man was known to both.

Despite both Bush and Eberle having been members of the Board of Directors of the Texas Lyceum Association, and despite Eberle having been one of Bush's home-state delegates during the 2000 presidential election, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan tried to assure the White House press corps (unconvincingly) there was no connection between the two men.

Why are they treating Eberle as though he were -- well, Jim Guckert? I don't know, but I will hazard a speculative note -- very speculative.

Back in the 1970s, a Californian named Paul Eberle became known as a publisher of sexually-oriented material. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But some writers -- not necessarily the most level-headed ones -- have claimed that an Eberle tabloid called "Finger" advocated sex with children. I have not seen the evidence myself, and thus cannot judge; the cited article defends Paul Eberle, and gives what appears to be a fair summary of the controversy.

Does Paul Eberle has any relationship with the extended Eberle "clan" mentioned above, or to the Eberle Communications Group headquartered in Virginia? I've found no evidence for this suggestion (which I mention in public only to spur further research). Neither can I explain why so many Texas Republicans seem to turn crimson at the sound of the name "Eberle."

5. Is there a larger sex ring? Wayne Madsen, bless his heart, takes this story into the wildest terrain yet.

Madsen finds Gannongate oddly redolent of the alleged White House-linked gay prostitution ring whose existence was revealed in a Reagan-era Washington Times article. This controversy has given rise to some rather bizarre allegations, best chronicled by the 1994 video "Conspiracy of Silence." (See here for my previous comments on the subject and a link to the film.) As I've made clear, I am not persuaded by the wildest of these claims.

Neither am I persuaded by the most striking paragraph in Madsen's piece -- even though it is quite intriguing, especially when viewed in light of the afore-cited CBS investigation:

Last year, a senior source on the Washington Times editorial staff (the same paper that broke the GOP pedophile scandal in 1989) linked White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove to gay activities involving top Republican political strategists in Washington, DC.

Why would a periodical owned by Reverend Moon, paymaster to so many prominent Republicans, make these disclosures (or, if you prefer, outlandish accusations)? I'm not sure. Moon's notorious hatred of homosexuality may figure into the equation.