Being Jeff Gannon

The Outskirts,
Mainstream Mediaville

While he's no John Malkovich, apparently Mr. Gannon does think he is Kirk Douglas:

"Although Press Secretary Scott McClellan and others at the White House knew that Gannon was not his real name, they always referred to him by that name, he said in the interview. "My professional name is Jeff Gannon, and that is what people called me,” he explained, adding, in an odd reference, “It is like Kirk Douglas, they do not refer to him when they meet him by his real name."

Shades of E. Howard Hunt and his red fright wig, or what?

And as ridiculous as it seems, Mr. Gannon/Guckert's cheap-jack disguise, like E.H.H.'s before it, may be providing a flimsy cover for something much more troubling than just acting as a soft-tosser for little Scottie McClellan.

Because, while he has been evasive, Gannon/Guckert has not flatly denied his involvement in the Wilson/Plame Affair. From the same Editor & Publisher interview cited above:

Gannon/Guckert said that contrary to many press reports, he was never subpoenaed by the special prosecutor and has never testified before a grand jury in the case. But he said he was interviewed by two FBI agents in his home for about 90 minutes last year.

"I answered their questions truthfully and honestly, but I would prefer not to say more,” he said. “I assume the information was routed back and that is why I was not called to testify."

Although he hinted that he had not seen a classified CIA document after all, he added, "I am not going to speak to that. It goes to something of a nature I do not want to discuss."

That last part is interesting, because on CBC radio last night Mary Lou Finlay gave Mr. Gannon enough rope and he took it. As reader Andrew in Caledon notes:

......caught part of a CBC phone interview with "Jeff" Friday evening -- to paraphrase: "did I ever say I read the memo ? did I ever say I saw the memo ? perhaps I just overheard a conversation about the memo. I never said I had knowledge of the contents"....

We pretty much heard the same thing just before 7pm PST last night while mixing the cheese powder into the Annie's Pasta with the 5 yr old, and thus we're waiting with baited breath for the RA file to be posted on the AIH website (this is Canuckistan after all, a place where technicians do crazy things like taking the weekend off) to be absolutely sure. Regardless, taken together with the E&P interview this pretty much confirms the existence of a scaleable Treasongate Wall because, even if he didn't actually see the thing, somebody told Gannon about the closely held CIA memo, and that person is the next link in the climbing chain.

Here's hopin' the next generation of young punk Woodward and/or Bernstein wannabes lurking in some mainstream newsroom somewhere starts grabbing, hard, at those links in an effort to climb the Wall (assuming, of course, that there is a mainstream media magnate out there with the guts of somebody like Katherine Graham to let them have a serious go at it).

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1. Update: forgot to give Rob Cottingham kudos earlier for being willing to whisper the 'C' word on this issue a couple of weeks ago.
2. Double Irony Update: Reader B.A.D. points out that it was Kirk Douglas who famously screamed, "I am not a freak!" in Spartacus.
3. Triple Irony Update: Spartacus, of course was the story of an uprising against Empire
4. Quadruple By-Pass Irony Update: The screenplay of Spartacus was written by blacklist victim Dalton Trumbo, who, for our money, wrote one of the finest anti-war/anti-empire books of all time.