McClellan in Guardian: Charges Against Gannon Just a "Conspiracy Theory"

[Stephanie]

Isn't about time these guys come up with another excuse? This is their answer to EVERYTHING. Unbelievable!

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Fake reporter unmasked at White House

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday February 11, 2005
The Guardian

The White House faced fresh accusations of a clandestine propaganda campaign yesterday after it emerged it granted regular access to a rightwing blogger with a habit of asking President Bush easy questions.
Jeff Gannon, who represented a rightwing site owned by a Texas-based Republican activist, had been a regular at White House briefings since 2003 but aroused reporters' suspicions after posing ideologically loaded questions.

The fake White House correspondent quit his job at the Talon News site on Wednesday after liberal bloggers found he had been operating under a pseudonym, and that he was linked to several gay pornographic web domain addresses under his real idenity, James Guckert.

The White House spokesman, Scott McLellan, has dismissed charges that Gannon was part of an underground propaganda effort as "just a wild conspiracy theory".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1410627,00.html

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Yeah, because it's a full-blown ABOVEGROUND propaganda effort!

[Minstrel Boy]

2. Let them keep using it. The more they do,

the less power the words have to deter inquiry.

If every freakin' charge is a "conspiracy theory," then by gum, we're on to something! :)

[Walt Starr]

3. BANG, we're getting to 'em!

Guckert is the weak link in the Plame chain and they know it!

[DemoTex]

4. Scotties balls are in an ever-tightening vise ..

He knows this scandal has legs.

[Bluebear]

5. And a "wild" one at that, Scotty says nt

[notadmblnd]

6. I wonder when in 2003 he began working there

because bobby Eberle had met with with Karl Rove sometime that year. In a December 2003 USA Today article. I found this snip here http://americablog.blogspot.com/

(USA Today, December 30, 2003), Kathy Kiely writes:

In the past year:

* GOPUSA.com, a Web site run by Bobby Eberle, a Houston engineer with no previous journalism experience, scored an interview with President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove.

Mr. Eberle is the CEO of GOPUSA.com and Talon News, Jeff Gannon's employer. He regularly writes on GOPUSA.com under the byline:

By Bobby Eberle
Talon News

[oasis]

10. Good find. Eberle/Rove will lead to Rove /Gannon. Where there's smoke...

:thumbsup:

[Jacobin]

7. Fine. The SS crisis is a "conspiracy theory"

The WMDs in Iraq are a conspiracy theory (oops, they really were one)

Nukes in NK are a conspiracy theory.

Hey Scott, denying what happened by calling it what you consider to be a bad name won't work. You're caught.

[CoffeeCat]

8. That's what they say when they're scared...

Yep, tear apart the people who are on to you--and define them as nutjobs. That means they're attempting to stave off scrutiny of the underlying, bigger story.

Let the games begin.

[tanyev]

9. Many important scientific discoveries

started out as theories. Then hard work and research were needed to prove that they were true.

[smoogatz]

11. Translation...

Whenever someone connected with the Bush administration says charges of wrongdoing on their part are a "conspiracy theory," it means the charges are true. Every time they say "conspiracy theory" it should be a huge red flag to investigative journalists and the Democratic opposition. It's what they said when they were accused, after 9/11, of ignoring warnings about al Qaeda's plans to hijack domestic flights. It's what they said when Sy Hersh blew the lid off Abu Ghraib. The more obvious and apparent the wrongdoing (the current revelations about subverting the press, for instance), the "wilder" the "conspiracy theory." Bushco's method for dealing with scrutiny is to never adress the substance, and always attack the person asking the difficult questions.

[mattclearing]

12. Boy, was this a bad idea.

Now everything they say is conspiracy theory will be taken more seriously.

NO ONE takes Fuckert seriously. If Scott McClellan had any sense, he would shut up about it.

Ari would have referred them to his previous statement.

[Roland99]

13. They used "conspiracy theory" to keep the Kerry camp at bay

on some issues, too.

[Stephanie]

16. It was very popular in all the news stories on voting fraud >

I found an old post where I collected a bunch of them. It was also an extremely popular phrase amoung House Republicans in the January 6 debate - the Boxer Rebellion.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html
Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether

Even as Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign is steadfastly refusing to challenge the results of the presidential election, the bloggers and the mortally wounded party loyalists and the spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists are filling the Internet with head-turning allegations. There is the one about more ballots cast than registered voters in the big Ohio county anchored by Cleveland. There are claims that a suspicious number of Florida counties ended up with Bush vote totals that were far larger than the number of registered Republican voters. And then there is the one that might be the most popular of all: the exit polls that showed Kerry winning big weren't wrong -- they were right.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/11/opinion/main655162.shtml
A Stolen Election?
Nov. 11, 2004
(The Nation) This column from The Nation was written by David Corn.

Before the vote counting was done, the e-mails started arriving. The election's been stolen! Fraud! John Kerry won! In the following days, these charges flew over the Internet. The basic claim was that the early exit polls -- which showed Kerry ahead of George W. Bush -- were right; the vote tallies were rigged. Could this be? Or have ballot booths with electronic voting machines become the new Grassy Knoll for conspiracy theorists?
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OLBERMANN CAN 'COUNTDOWN,' BUT CAN HE COUNT UP?
Wed Nov 10, 6:41 PM ET
By Ann Coulter

On Fox News' "Special Report," Brit Hume raised the nut conspiracy theories circulating on the Web about Republicans stealing the presidential election. The liberals on the panel responded by quickly pointing out that no national Democrats -- not even Terry McAuliffe! -- had suggested that there had been any systematic vote theft. Hume admitted the rumors of vote fraud were limited to nutcases on the Web.
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http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=%5CPolitics%5Carchive%5C200411%5CPOL20041112a.html
Conservative John Fund Jabs Voter Conspiracy Theorists
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
November 12, 2004

Washington (CNSNews.com) - The charge by some on the left that President George Bush stole the 2004 presidential election was dismissed Thursday as "Internet conspiracy theories" by the author of a new book on voter fraud.

John Fund, the author of "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy" and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, told CNSNews.com that "you can always tell a losing party by the number of people in the fever swamps who come up with elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the fact that the real problem is they lost an election."
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http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/12/m1a_Conspiracy_1112.html
Bush's wins on Democratic turf fuel conspiracy cries
By Jane Musgrave
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004

Internet bloggers and other conspiracy theorists point to Dixie and many of the state's other rural Democratic-leaning counties to shore up their beliefs that the election was stolen from Kerry.
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http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=46608
Conspiracy theorists focus on voting machines
By DAN THANH DANG
The Baltimore Sun
Comcast

John F. Kerry barely had time to concede the presidential race before the conspiracy theory began circulating.

Democratic Underground, a Web site founded in January 2001 "to protest the illegitimate presidency of George W. Bush," immediately questioned how Bush ended up with "a mysterious 5 percent advantage," despite early exit polling that showed Kerry with the lead.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39521-2004Nov10.html
The Vote Fraud Buzz
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, November 10, 2004; 12:01 PM

Rick Klein writes in the Boston Globe: "A week after Kerry conceded and Bush declared victory, those assertions and scores of others from New Mexico to North Carolina have kept alive fierce speculation that Bush's victory either wasn't real or wasn't as decisive as it seemed. With memories fresh from the 2000 irregularities, e-mails and Web postings accuse Republicans of stealing an election.

"Much of the traffic is little more than Internet-fueled conspiracy theories, and none of the vote-counting problems and anomalies that have emerged are sufficiently widespread to have affected the election's ultimate result. . . .
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2109141 /
Rage Against the Machines
The Web wonders if electronic voting machines stole the election.
By Josh Levin
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 4:34 PM PT

The fact that the race hinged on Ohio inspired some conspiracy-minded folk to remember Diebold Chairman and CEO Walden O'Dell's August 2003 vow that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president." Comments on Oliver Willis' blog, for instance, speculate that perhaps Diebold, an electronic voting machine manufacturer, had something to do with Green Party candidate David Cobb's huge early vote totals in some Ohio counties. (These numbers were later corrected.)

But conspiracy theorists really latched onto John Kerry's promising exit-poll numbers. Just months ago, there was a lot of controversy over whether exit polls revealed election fraud in Venezuela. Is it possible that American exit polls weren't wrong, but, rather, exposed that Kerry's early afternoon advantages had been erased by a GOP-friendly hacker?

The News Target Network has a rundown on Bush's "mysterious '5% advantage' " in states that use electronic voting here. The site Democratic Underground, which as of 4:20 p.m. PT Nov. 3 has closed its forums to non-registered users, argued that hanky panky could have happened in states that don't have paper receipts. "EVERY STATE that has EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results." On the other hand, "In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error."
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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2002087790_voting11.html
Thursday, November 11, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.
Conspiracy theories about presidential election flood Internet
By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating

MIAMI — The e-mail subject lines couldn't be any bigger and bolder: "Another Stolen Election," "Presidential election was hacked," "Ohio Fraud."

Even as Sen. John Kerry's campaign is steadfastly refusing to challenge the results of the presidential election, the bloggers and the mortally wounded party loyalists and the spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists are filling the Internet with head-turning allegations.
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[Roland99]

17. It was also used to keep the MSM quiet about Bush's "bulge"

[mattclearing]

18. Bush said conspiracy theory in the post-9/11 joint session speech.

I was like, "Did someone float a conspiracy theory?"

I'm not sure many people were there yet. And I'm sure almost no one said anything to that effect.

[SpiralHawk]

19. With this, "conspiracy theory" may gain renewed legitimacy

BushCo can only cry wolf so many times.

I think they have exhausted the usefulness of the "conspiracy theorist" charge, and that no one pays attention to them anymore when they say that -- exepting hard-core Republobots.

Language is mutable. i think "conspiracy theory" is getting a new, respectable meaning, thanks to BushCo overuse and abuse.

[mattclearing]

20. I sure hope so. God knows these people conspire daily. n/t

[Hugin]

14. Yup... That's me!

Mr. Conspiracy Theory!

Woohoo!

[jswordy]

15. Remember in the Westerns how they would drag brush behind the horses...

...to cover their tracks? Well, it's hard to do when the horse has left turds behind!

LOL

[JerseygirlCT]

21. Every single time they're challenged, this is the response.

We need a good zinger to answer it, every single time.