One of our friendly neighborhood trolls has been demanding that I provide the so-called “softball” questions that were posed by fake reporter Jeff Gannon during White House news conferences. My guess is, now that I’ve posted them, that he’ll come back claiming, ridiculously, that they’re all legitimate, hard-hitting questions, but, in the spirit of good sportsmanship, I’ve decided to play along and offer them up… The following questions come by way of the Washington Post , from a transcript of Keith Olberman’s MSNBC show:

May 10, 2004:

Gannon: “In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you’ve used words like ’sickening,’ ‘disgusting’ and ‘reprehensible.’ Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam’s rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?”

White House Press Secretary McClellen: “I’m glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often…”

July 15, 2004:

Gannon: “Last Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that shows that Ambassador Joe Wilson lied when he said his wife didn’t put him up for the mission to Niger. The British inquiry into their own prewar intelligence yesterday concluded that the President’s 16 words were ‘well-founded.’ Doesn’t Joe Wilson owe the President and America an apology for his deception and his own intelligence failure?”

April 1, 2004:

Gannon: “I’d like to comment on the angry mob that surrounded Karl Rove’s house on Sunday. They chanted and pounded on the windows until the D.C. police and Secret Service were called in. The protest was organized by the National People’s Action Coalition, whose members receive taxpayer funds, as well as financial support from groups including Theresa Heinz Kerry’s Tides Foundation.”

McClellen: “I would just say that, one, we appreciate and understand concerns that people may have. I would certainly hope that people would respect the families of White House staff.”

Feb. 10, 2004:

Gannon: “Since there have been so many questions about what the President was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda, denouncing America’s racist war in Vietnam? Did he testify before Congress that American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else’s medals at the White House to protest a war America was still fighting?”

Pretty pathetic, right? I mean, if it wasn’t clear before that this guy was a propaganda tool of the administration, just sitting there in the White House press corps, waiting to introduce talking points like the ones listed above, it is now, right? You’d have to be an idiot not to see that, right?

And, here’s the question that went too far, causing the folks at Media Matters to call for an investigation.

Gannon: “Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work – you said you’re going to reach out to these people – how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

Of course, as we’d soon come to find out, Reid had never mentioned soup lines. (That was something Rush Limbaugh had attributed to him in jest on his radio program the day previously.)

If you’re interested in reading more of Gannon’s questions, you can find a bunch of them at the Media Matters site.

And, while we’re at it, there’s a good piece in a Salon blog about Gannon today. Here’s a clip:

Let’s remember that, while its press secretary is calling on the Jeff Gannons of the world for cover, the Bush administration is also offering under-the-counter payoffs to columnists and sending out video press releases in which PR people masquerade as reporters. This isn’t a simple matter of a gaffe here and there; it’s a systematic campaign to discredit the media, launched by an administration that desperately needs to keep propping up its Potemkin Village versions of reality (We’ll find weapons of mass destruction! We’ll cut the deficit! We’ll save Social Security by phasing it out! Really!). When you’re pursuing an Orwellian agenda, your first target must be anyone who has the standing to point it out. Messengers are a pain – but if you shoot enough of them (figuratively speaking!), and send out enough impostors, you can have any message you want.

Now we just need to sit back and wait for the trolls to come out, defending Gannon’s questions as legitimate, and suggesting once again that we’re only pursuing this story because he’s gay.