My friend Tim Neagle — who needs his own blog, damnit — sent along this note as part of an email. I’m posting it with permission. (Explanatory note: Tim was Executive News Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle a few years back.)

Have you been following this “Jeff Gannon” story, the right winger who managed to get into the White House press corps without actually being a journalist? I can tell you as one who once attended a White House press conference that there is NO WAY you can get in there under an assumed name. I had to submit my SS # and other forms of ID well in advance, and then was scrutinized for a LONG time at the White House gate before I was admitted, even though I was with the Chronicle’s Washington Bureau chief.  The only way this character got in is with White House compliance. Anyone who says different is lying.

And lying pretty clumsily, as seems increasingly to be this Administration’s SOP.

Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.

1. 
   Vicki 2005 02 14 at 10:02:03 pm

   And even more interestingly, Jeff Gannon seems to be a gay man with a penchent for hustling on web pages.  (See http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html.)

   Now, I couldn’t care less about what Jeff Gannon does on his off time.  But the Bushies purport to care.  They appear to care a lot.  But nevertheless, they let a gay hustler have access to classified documents?  He passed the security screening?

    

   If this had been the Clinton White House, talking heads would have been having orgasms on camera about this.

2. 
   leslee 2005 02 14 at 11:19:02 pm

   I saw the story in Salon recently. The Bushies feel so powerful they’re not worried about the niceties. They know they create their own reality, so why worry about blatant things like this. Their followers will believe anything they say, and they don’t give a shit about anyone else.