gannon

The Gannon Story has been bubbling up for a couple weeks now. "Jeff Gannon" is nom de video of the man in the White House press room who asked George W. Bush that weird softball question recently, the one that accused Democrats of being "out of touch with reality." Gannon's sort of noise fills up the private rooms where Republicans let down their hair, and gets noted with indignant gasps on lefty weblogs or op-eds but seldom gets disseminated from such august settings as the media room of the White House. My favorite coinage so far tags the story, "Propagannon"; this man smelled of the dirty-tricks propaganda campaigns of Bush behind-the-scenes man Karl Rove. Or, anyway, some diarists at dailykos decided to run "Gannon" in Google and see what came up. And things came up!

You have to know already the context for this post, but it's a nice thumbnail of the "gay underground", the closeted men who know that being out would get in the way of their hobnobbing with the powerful, so they're not out, sometimes married, and often verbally bash out gays, either because they are self-hating or as a calculated distraction. Padraig (at the link) says, "I know Gay men of a certain age and income who routinely excoriate "the fags" ... But since the lights are out in the orgy rooms, good Republicans are happy to just overlook and pretend not to see. It is the public avowal of affection that makes them crazy over the gay marriage issue. ... I personally am sick and tired of being told that my only option is to have a lavender marriage with an understanding lesbian or a loveless marriage with an unsuspecting woman while trolling public toilets and internet chat rooms on the side. [Typical Republican alternatives to same sex marriage]"

For that context go to the "Jeff Gannon" page at dkosopedia.