Friday, February 25, 2005

What's the fuss?

The left is so upset about Gannon/Guckert I keep wondering if I am too quick to forgive the Bush administration. But no matter how I look at it, I still don't see what the fuss is.

Ok, he used a pseudonym. So what? Wolf Blitzer has also used the names Ze'ev Blitzer and Ze'ev Barak.

He's a partisan Republican. Helen Thomas used to scold the Bush administration in the form of questions. Does this mean that partisans are ok as long as they are anti-Bush.

He got a press pass when Maureen Dowd didn't. Except he got day passes and she wanted a permanent pass. The big surprise here, at least to me, is that Down thinks of herself as a reporter who covers the White House. My impression of her for years has been a columnist who picks up stories from the wire service and writes her opinion of them. Kind of a blogger without links.

He was given access to classified information/he was responsible for the forged memos. There is no proof for either claim.

UPDATE: I forgot about this one:
He should have been denied a press pass because there are gay web sites registered under his name (his real one). Why are background checks done? I thought it was for security, not morals. Just as other reporters have used other names, columnists working for respected news organizations have a checkered past. Newsweek has a columnist who has posed for Playboy more than once and produced videos for them. One contains a bit of bondage. I am referring to Patti Davis whose column I quoted recently. Her background might not be quite as racy as Gannon's but she did both under the same name.

Marc Cooper gives some more reasons why we have already devoted too much space to the story.

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