FLACCID SALES Gannon

Even another gay Republican sex scandal couldn't save Jeff Gannon's new book, The Great Media War, which promised a "behind the scenes look at the White House Press Corps and the Bush Administration."

However, only three weeks since its release, the book is ranked in the 780,000 range on amazon.com. By comparison, Robert Draper's Dead Certain, which was released the same week as Gannon's tome, currently stands at 62.

Gannon, of course, was outed as a former male escort in 2005 and was forced to resign from the conservative Talon News service, for which he had covered the White House since 2003. His male clients knew him as "Bulldog."

Bulldog couldn't have asked for better timing with his tome. Through some tawdry twist of fate, The Great Media War hit during the height of the Sen. Larry Craig's bathroom follies—a coincidence that even Gannon (born James Dale Guckert) thought might propel sales. Gannon expected a best-seller, according to his pals.

So, why the flop? Mike Rogers, the blogger who first outed Sen. Craig back in October, and former New York Times fabulist Jayson Blair have some ideas.

For one, the book lacks "a natural constituency for book sales," Rogers says. "Overwhelmingly, gays and lesbians have rejected Jeff's philosophy that the Bush Administration is pro-gay and that the conservative agenda serves the community better than a progressive one.... As soon as it became public that Jeff is gay, his party kicked him to the curb, just as they did to Larry Craig."

Jayson Blair, who shares a degree of disgrace with Gannon, says his problem has less to do with politics than content.

"Jeff seems to focus on the topic of liberal bias in the media, which is not really a memoir about his career," Blair tells Radar. "Those books have been done and worked well in the past, but for whatever reason this was has not latched onto that same furor. My guess is that is because the furor for media bias books has died down a bit."

Still, Gannon is not deterred. "I'm pleased so far," he told us last week, adding that sales have been "rather brisk."