Dark Bilious Vapors

we get an excellent example of "open source journalism at its finest": J.D. Guckert/Jeff Gannon: These Are Your Lives!

But Wait!

Before he asks that question ... Did we just say ... an auto body repair shop?

Yes, it's true. Guckert's path to the president reads like a modern-day fairy tale on steroids. In less than twelve months, Guckert was catapulted from the position of office manager of family-owned and operated Karmak, Inc., in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to the White House briefing room, with a quick - but thus far unverified beyond Guckert's claim - two-day seminar at the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School.

Meteoric doesn't begin to describe such a rise.

Nothing in his professional resume would lead one to predict he'd be rubbing elbows with the cream of the American press corps, with unprecedented exceptions made for press pass qualifications, so that he could - on what must be the longest "day pass" ever - help the president out in a pinch or give predictable oral op/eds disguised as questions at hundreds of press briefings.

Nothing would predict that an avidly partisan website, GOPUSA, run by a couple of well-connected Texas Republicans, would go to the lengths of creating an entire "news" agency - Talon News - simply to justify Guckert's non-qualified presence at briefings.

Let's take a look at that resume.

Landscaping. A public teacher's certificate. Office jobs. Two decades of kicking around the liquor distribution business in Pennsylvania and Delaware, and then ... leaving a friend's auto body shop in January 2002, to resurface in November of the same year as "Jeff Gannon," the "Conservative Guy," in a short, unpromising commentary on an obscure web site. And less than three months later, he would sit in the White House, Row D, center orchestra. Nice seat.

Some of the stretches of Guckert's life are still quite sketchy - the late 1980's and early 1990's, for one; and the pivotal period of giving notice at Karmak in December 2001 and popping up during the ensuing year as a publicly fictional "conservative guy," for another. And where his now well-known moonlighting career as a pornography webmaster and advertised escort on the internet intersects with his official resume leads to more suggestive questions than concrete answers.

Part of the oddity of Guckert's life is not only that his official resume in no way prepared him for the White House, but that he created not just one, but two, diametrically opposed personas in the past few years - "Jeff Gannon," the conservative guy who fell in line with the "Gods, guns and gays" Rovian talking points and spread them like a virus throughout cyberspace, and "Bulldog" (or "Jeff" or "Lou"), gay escort and pornography webmaster.

Len on 03.29.05 @ 12:26 PM CST