Seriously Weird

OK, here's some serious weirdness. On January 28, blogger Atrios noted that an individual working under the name Jeff Gannon is allowed to be credentialed for White House briefings under what is apparently a pseudonym, despite strict rules against this -- for example, married women reporters must be credentialed under their married name, even if they use their maiden names as their byline.

It seems this "Jeff Gannon" person had acquired something of a reputation for lobbing huge fluffy softball-type questions during the press conferences, and was even called on by the president in one of his "Q&A" events. The "news service" that he worked for, Talon News, turned out to be owned by a GOP operative type out of Texas. Gannon's articles (which have since been removed from the site) are said to have consisted mainly of verbatim transcriptions of White House press releases.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with agreeing with the administration; I know some people think that way and that's their right. But it starts to look funny if a person gets White House credentials under a different set of rules than everyone else, has no history as a reporter or writer, and then shows up at press briefings and doesn't even bother to actually write anything. Maybe it's just me, but I think that's kind of odd.

And I'm not the only one who found it odd. Turns out, there's this whole web of bizarreness associated with this guy Gannon, or Guckert, or whatever his name is.

• Here's a New York Times article about it (subscription required).
• The always delightful S.Z. at World O'Crap summarizes the early findings here.
• Americablog has been all over the story as it gets increasingly strange.
• Digby at Hullabaloo.
• Also check out The Raw Story.
• Of course, Giblets over at Fafblog! sees the whole thing as an opportunity, bless his heart.

Anyway, it seems like a way bigger deal to me than an occasional blowjob or a real-estate deal that didn't even turn out to be all that shady. Where are the special investigators? But the clincher, in my view, is that the guy is just obviously not any kind of a journalist or writer at all. Here's the statement he left up on one of his websites noting his return to private life.