"In this day and age, "he said," when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide, to try to pick and choose who is a journalist. "

Um, Scottie, how about somebody who has ever worked as a reporter for a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio station? Most people would start there. Google" James D. Guckert, "our hero's real name, and you won't find a long list of professional accomplishments. None, actually.

Among left-of-center bloggers," Gannon" already was notorious for simply adding his byline to GOP press releases and posting them as news stories online. He'd also posted articles claiming that a former intern had given interviews to TV networks revealing her love affair with Sen. John Kerry--something that never happened. Even nastier, and ironically, given his secret identity, he'd attacked the Democratic presidential nominee as potentially America's "first gay president."

But it was the slow-pitch meatball that "Gannon" lobbed to President Bush during his recent news conference that really set critics off. Bush had just apologized for the Education Department's Pravda-style $240,000 payment to pundit Armstrong Williams for praising White House policies. Perhaps fearing that a real reporter would ask a follow-up query about pundits paid to tout administration "pro-family" initiatives, or about government-sponsored infomercials narrated by an actress playing TV reporter "Karen Ryan" that got broadcast as news stories on many stations, McClellan called on "Gannon." "Gannon" delivered. Falsely attributing to Democratic Sens. Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton statements about "soup lines" and an economy "on the verge of collapse" that he'd apparently borrowed from Rush Limbaugh, he asked Bush, "[H] ow are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"

Bush's answer wasn't memorable. But a few days later, gay activist John Aravosis of Americablog. org revealed "Gannon's" secret identity. Whining that his privacy had been violated, Gannon/Guckert quickly resigned. Later, in an interview with media critic Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, Gannon/Guckert "did not dispute evidence that he has advertised himself as a $200-an-hour gay escort, but would not specifically address such questions," Kurtz reported.

As if to demonstrate that people on the cultural left often don't think any better than their putative opponents on the right, online publications like Salon. com ran letters from gay readers denouncing his forced outing as "homophobic." Excuse me, but when you pose for explicit photos and advertise your services on the Internet, it's not private, it's public. More typical was Kurtz's complaint that "I didn't go into journalism, frankly, to be looking at Web sites like hotmilitarystud. com." Well, frankly, I never expected to read anything like the Starr Report. Try to imagine the uproar if the Bill Clinton White House had pulled something similar. Every committee in Congress would run televised hearings 24/7. On "Hardball," GOP attack blondes would be speaking in tongues. Tim Russert might simply explode. The bitterest irony, of course, is that Bush, the most theatrically "manly" president since Ronald Reagan--he often dresses as if auditioning for the Village People--might never have been elected but for his 2004 campaign's calculated appeal to homophobia.