'Gannon' and Fleischer

[Plaid Adder]

I watched the Olbermann segment with the editor of E&P and I got to thinking:

Let's for a moment go to Bizarro-land and assume temporarily that what Fleischer told E&P is actually the truth. Supposedly now that he's not working, he might be able to tell it once in a while.

Here's an interesting sequence of events:

1) "Gannon" shows up in the WH briefing room round about February 2003 and starts asking goofball questions. Fleischer doesn't know how he got in there, and notices that he's listed as working for GOPUSA. Also doesn't know that "Gannon" is a pseudonym. HOwever, knowing his acronyms, he suspects him of being a partisan plant. So he stops calling on him.

2) Fleischer calls Eberle about "Gannon," who says oh no, we're not connected to the party, we just use the GOP acronym so people will THINK we're connected to the party.

3) Fleischer starts calling on "Gannon" again. Eberle starts working on 'launching' Talon "News" in order to make "Gannon" a "journalist."

4) In May of 2003, Fleischer announces his intention to resign. Around about the same time, a lot of other Bush appointees/lackeys announce their resignations:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/plaidder/2003/05/22 /

5) McClellan takes over. No questions are ever asked by him about wth this crazy "Gannon" character is or wtf "Talon News" might be, though the questions are more loopily partisan than ever.

Could it be that one of the reasons Fleischer decided to quit was that he couldn't stand what the Bush administration was doing to the WH press pool? If you believe his end of the story, Fleischer pegged "Gannon" as a plant and stopped calling on him. Then he ends up in conversation with Eberle about "Gannon," and his suspicions are confirmed (we're not an OFFICIAL GOP site so it's OK...yeah, sure, Bobby). After that, he starts calling on "Gannon" again. And 3 months later, Fleischer decides to quit.

What if Fleischer was told by the Powers That Be after that conversation with Eberle that he had to play ball and call on "Gannon" whether or not he was a real journalist? What if that was one of the many things that must have made it clear to Fleischer that this whole 'managing the media' thing was no longer going to be a fun game of cat and mouse between himself and his worthy adversaries which he could actually enjoy, but instead a cheerless exercise in pre-scripted propaganda? Say what you want about Fleischer--and I have (http://www.plaidder.com/ari.htm )--he had a kind of zest for the work that you don't see in McClellan. Maybe one of the reasons he walked was that he saw Gannon as a harbinger of things to come that were going to make his job a chore instead of a challenge.

Remember, the period between "Gannon's" initial appearance and Fleischer's decision to resign covers the initial invasion phase of the Iraq war plus the premature "Mission Accomplished" speech. They expected these months to be the basis for the next re-election campaign. Rove must have been pulling sequential all-nighters trying to manage every goddamn thing he could think of about the media representation of this war. Maybe "Gannon's" appearance in the WH briefing room was part of that strategy--and maybe by May, Fleischer was just fed up with it.

This war journal I've been keeping has come in very handy. I posted about the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. According to Salon, "Talon News" was formed in March and launched in "early April." Bush announced the end of "combat operations" sometime shortly before May 7. The flurry of resignations--Fleischer, Jay Garner, Tommy Franks, Christine Todd Whitman--began shortly before May 20.

Obviously "Gannon" didn't actually *cause* all those resignations. But he could very easily be a symptom of something that *could* have caused those resignations: the WH inner circle's response to the unraveling of what was supposed to be their triumph in Iraq. Garner and Franks either were removed or quit between "Mission Accomplished" and "bring it on." My guess is that this was either beacuse the WH would no longer tolerate their dissenting views on what to do about Iraq, or because Garner and Franks realized that the WH 'policy' on the occupation was going to become a disaster very quickly, and they didn't want to be around to take the shit. Similarly, Fleischer's resignation was probably the result either of his refusal to play along with whatever the WH wanted to do with the WH briefing room (which would have led to his being fired) or his conviction that the stupid games Rove was playing with plants like "Gannon" were liable to blow up in someone's face and he didn't want it to be his own.

Who knows? I sure don't. But I hope we eventually get to find out what the real story was.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder