Gannon makes an entrance

I had hoped to revisit the Gannon story after completing a few private inquiries , but a couple of items on the web require some mention.

Carol Towarnicky of the Philadelphia Daily News has a fine new piece on the scandal:

IF A REPORTER who doubled as a gay hooker had visited the Clinton White House nearly 200 times, think it would have made the news?

If "Jeff Gannon"/James D. Guckert had been unveiled, so to speak, as a liberal imposter who lobbed softball questions at Clinton administration press briefings, he would be as infamous as Michael Schiavo.

And if 39 of those White House visits were mysteriously unrelated to his "reporting" duties, imagine what innuendoes would be issuing forth from Planet Limbaugh. Imagine the organized phone call campaign demanding newspapers and TV stations report the story.

But Gannon/Guckert isn't being unveiled or innuendoed or even blipped on media radar screens, even among liberals.

True enough. But right-wing bloggers are spinning the story as a liberal obsession. Take a look, for example, at Wiz-bang, which offers a response to a Washington Post piece by Howard Kurtz. Kurtz having made a reference to Gannon's seamy past, Wizbang responds:

The "seamy past" Kurtz refers to is a single, non-explicit picture, hardly enough to trace back to his past.

A single-non-explicit picture? Yeesh! What was actually uncovered were pages of advertising for Gannon's services as an escort, including imagery that -- to put the matter delicately -- left nothing to the imagination. Is this what passes for fact-checking on the right? Lord knows I make my share of errors, but come on...

In an orgasm of disingenuity, Wizbang thus quotes Kurtz:

In defending his name change, the man born as James Guckert says Jeff Gannon has a "nice ring to it -- like Wolf Blitzer, which isn't his real name either."

As Oscar Wilde once noted, quotation can be slander if you gerrymander. Here's the full quote:

In defending his name change, the man born as James Guckert says Jeff Gannon has a "nice ring to it -- like Wolf Blitzer, which isn't his real name either." Actually, Mr. Guckert, it is his real name.

(Emphasis added by me.)

On another corner of the political map, we have TBRNews -- which I have, in the past, stupidly refered to as TRBnews. (As noted earlier: I make my share of mistakes, but at least they aren't convenient mistakes.) This mysterious site has published another one of its bizarre "Voice of the White House" columns. The latest column adds cement to the suspicion that the Voice's long-running "anonymous White House insider" pose is just a silly scam, designed to add credibility to what would otherwise be just another blog. Note the following:

My God, such fun! Seems that our professional male prostitute, phony “news” reporter and keeper of a Forbidden Journal, using a Secret Service day pass, visited the White House 196 times in two years, and spent the night 12 times! That’s right, spent the night 12 times.

And:

The Secret Service has people working in it who do not like Bush or his nocturnal activities and they released the logs although they refused to do so during the investigations into Clinton’s activities in the White House. I have seen copies of these and have been checking them, (actually my computer-savvy secretary has been doing this) against what was going on inside the White House when Gannon appeared and, especially, when he was overnighting. Guess what? There were many times when he visited here when there were no press conferences or news briefings. These were for the daytime visits.

All quite interesting, but none of this is news to regular readers of Kos, DU, or a number of humbler blogs, who had already uncovered these facts. The "Voice," posing as an insider, is taking credit for the work done by other internet sleuths.

That said, the Voice does raise a good question, one which has been gnawing at yours truly for some days now. Why bring a male escort into the White House if not to provide sexual services?

That question answers itself. And just who would use such services?

When Gannon-gate broke, we saw a number of hazily-sourced stories appear, indicating that Karl Rove and Scott McClellan are gay. Were these claims a diversion? Even if the allegations are true -- and I have no overwhelming reason to believe that they are -- these men do not live at the White House. Those who work in that building who are wont to tryst can tryst elsewhere, at some location that does not require secreting a hooker past the Secret Service.

Ask yourself: How many males actually live at the White House?

I can think of only one.

The records indicate that Gannon must have had some means of entering and exiting the mansion without coming to the notice of the Secret Service. I've been trying to research just how he could manage (pardon the expression) the trick.

A Washington Post story published in the wake of 9/11 revealed that a secret passage connects the WH residence to the underground bunker where Cheney spent the emergency.

I have yet to determine whether another tunnel connects that bunker to an outside entrance, but logic compels us to make that presumption. The bunker exists to provide shelter in case of a nuclear attack, and those who planned the structure cannot have expected workers to dig through radioactive rubble to get at the president. Obviously, a lengthy passageway must connect the bunker to some covert entry place outside the blast radius.

I don't know the location of this entrance, and anyone who does know would be a fool to reveal it. For present purposes, we need merely recognise that an entry exists.

And that, I posit, provides one means by which Jeff Gannon might have entered the White House without alerting the Secret Service.

Another possibility: US News and World Report mentioned that, during the Reagan administration, former president Nixon once secretly visited the White House, using an underground passage linking that building with the State Department.