In addition to being an "old Arab," she apparently is now also a high-priced hooker.
First, I simply love the fact that the most radical right-wing Web sites and rabblerousers are defending a gay male prostitute. We are truly winning the values war in this country when far-right-wingers embrace gay hookers.
Putting that aside, the notion of comparing GannonGuckert's journalism experience to Helen Thomas' is simply bizarre. Gee, let's compare the two.
Helen Thomas: Served 57 years as a correspondent for UPI and as White House bureau chief.Yeah, I can see how the far-right keeps getting the two of them confused.
James D Guckert: Worked as a car repairman, as a $200/hour and $1200/weekend high-priced whore, then attended a $50 two-day course in right-wing journalism and waltzed in to the White House, then claims he gets inside information on CIA scandals, the war, the Dan Rather scandal, and the Senate minority leader. Is America a great country or what?
Seriously, though, this is a real issue. The far-right is now trying to argue not only that mainstream journalists are all liberals (and we can see by their coverage of this story, or lack thereof, that they are hardly liberal-philes), but now the right is trying to claim that journalism doesn't even exist as a profession. ANYONE can join the fun - be a hooker on a Friday and a White House correspondent on a Monday, and no one should bat an eye.
Well, I bat. I got a writing degree in college. I went to law school and grad school to hone my critical thinking skills. I've had to write in all my professional jobs over the past 16 years, including preparing arms control memos for US Senators. I've worked as a stringer for the Economist, and have had articles published in the New Republican and beyond. I've ghost written articles for people you'd all know and love. That's why I'm confident calling myself a journalist and a writer, and it's why I'm confident in saying that you aren't a journalist just because you call yourself one.
No, I don't think bloggers should be necessarily thrown out of the White House as non-journalists. But let's be clear about two things. First, just because you launch a blog doesn't mean you get automatic daily access to the White House or the president of the United States. To suggest that that's the standard is absurd generally, and in a time of war would be simply bizarre.
Second, GannonGuckert wasn't a blogger. He was nothing. Three months before he waltzed into the White House as a "journalist" he had sex with a very satisfied client for $200/hour, according to his own prostitution solicitation online. He had no apparent writing experience at all (other than a 2-day $50 GOP course) before the White House accepted his request for a journalist's day pass in February 2003. And at the time he got that pass, he wasn't writing for any media outlet, yet still got the pass.
Contrast GannonGuckert's ease of access to another online publication that just so happens to be a REAL publication.
They've been turned down twice now for the oh-so-supposedly-easy-to-get day pass that GannonGuckert got for two years straight. Now, how is it that a publication that actually exists, and has existed for a while, can't get a day pass to the White House press gaggle, but a male prostitute who doesn't work for a real publication and has no experience in the media walks in the door and not only gets the pass, but they give him the same pass repeatedly for 2 whole years.
And getting a day pass repeatedly is a big no-no. To get that kind of repeated access, you need a hard pass, something that requires a 3-month FBI background check (apparently because you're going to be in the White House so often that you could pose a threat to national security). But GannonGuckert never applied for a hard pass, but the White House still let him, giving him the repeated access you only get once you've passed a 3-month FBI background check.
That's called a security breach of the White House during wartime. And that, my friends, is why GannonGuckert is different from Helen Thomas. Helen Thomas didn't breach White House security. Helen Thomas wasn't involved in a criminal enterprise. Helen Thomas was a journalist who got into the White House the old-fashioned way. She earned it.
So the question remains: Why did the White House breach security repeatedly for this one apparently-unknown obscure man?
