Is Gannon/Guckert the GOP’s Monica Lewinski?

The Clinton/Lewinski scandal also broke on the Internet. The Drudge Report carried a story on January 17, 1998 that Newsweek had killed a scoop by Michael Isikoff about an affair between President Clinton and Monica Lewinski. With that revelation, the Clinton/Lewinski expose was off and running. Who would have dreamed the pious Bible thumping GOP could make l’affaire Lewinsky look so tame? Yes, Bill Clinton was a lech, but a garden-variety lech. Clinton was a charming, lusty, lech who found women irresistible and acted on it. But the Bush administration with its values rhetoric, decency harangues, speeches that turn into proselytizing born-again sermons and fire and brimstone rants against homosexuality has taken trouser-dropping erotic episodes to a new low. In the black community it’s called “being on the down-low”. The stories the Net is carrying about the BushMen allege that James Guckert, a gay male hooker who used the alias Jeff Gannon, infiltrated the White House press corps with no bonafide credentials but with White House blessings, that Guckert was a shill for GOPUSA and was scripted by the White House to ask pro-GOP/anti-Dem questions at press conferences, that Guckert provides male companions for the Bush administration for a hefty fee. And that the President has been carrying on a homosexual affair with one of his roommates at Yale, Victor Ashe (who GWB appointed Ambassador to Poland), for the past 35 years. All of these items are in addition to the “scandal sheet” posted by Salon.com on January 18, 2005, listing and elaborating on 34 scandals in the Bush administration which are, as Salon said, “every one of them worse than Whitewater” --the unsubstantiated claims of malfeasance against the Clintons. Could it be any juicier? And what does the Christian Right have to say about the Gannon/Guckert allegations? Bill Berkowitz who writes a column about the conservative movement for WorkingForChange said on February 24th that so far the American Right has been silent. Folks who either said there was no one around at the time to answer Berkowitz’s questions or they weren’t commenting on the Gannon issue were: Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family, The Family Research Council, The Traditional Values Coalition and The Free Congress Foundation. In addition, Berkowitz said, “The editors at Town Hall, the Heritage Foundation's one stop shopping center for conservative ideas, and the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, currently involved in trashing HBO's Bill Maher over recent remarks he made about religion, didn't return my calls. Charisma News Service and the Christian Response Network didn't respond to my email questions about their lack of coverage of the Gannon Affair.” A lot of people are saying that focusing on all the alleged sexual misconduct of the Bush administration is unproductive and we should be using our energies to counteract the wrongheaded policies of the BushMen. I would feel that way too if it weren’t for the Repubs’ obsession with sex. I really want to knuckle down and understand the fine points of the Bush social services cuts, or the Bush plan to make wounded American soldiers from the Iraq war pay more for prescriptions, or the plan to screw money out of the elderly, or another plan to give monetary aid to very, very, very wealthy Americans, or the unworkable Bush plan for Social Security, or the Bush plan to bomb the bejesus out of Iran. But every time I start to study these important issues, the White House gang gets their panties in a twist over homosexuals, or sex education for teenagers, or sex on TV, or sex at the movies, or sex on the Internet. And then I have to start thinking about sex again. Which, apparently, is what the BushMen are doing...thinking about sex all the time, twenty-four-seven. Or at least plotting ways to fuck the world every which way til Kingdom Come.