FIRST CHAPTER 'Blinded by the Right' By DAVID BROCK Bobby Kennedy was my first political hero; his legend helped shape my early social conscience. Before heading off to college, I looked forward to serving as an intern at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., which was dedicated to continuing RFK's work. The year was 1980, and the country was at an ideological crossroads in the presidential election between Democratic President Jimmy Carter, who had defeated Senator Edward Kennedy in a bitterly contested primary battle, and Carter's conservative challenger, Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California. In Washington, I worked out of a charming old town house with polished pinewood floors for a man named David Hackett, a close friend of Bobby Kennedy's who had worked in the Kennedy Justice Department in the 1960s. A man in his late fifties, with a lean, athletic build and the endearing air of an absentminded professor, Hackett possessed both the brimming idealism of the Kennedy clan and the Kennedy swagger. He zoomed into work each day in a plum-colored Fiat Spider. Working comfortably with a group of fellow aspiring journalists and liberal public policy advocates from around the country, I was assigned to one of the foundation's projects, the Student Press Service, a youth-run newswire that dispatched reports from the nation's capital on federal policy dealing with young people-financial aid, child welfare, bilingual education, youth employment, national service-to subscribing high school and college newspapers. I had been living in Washington only a few months when I cast my first vote, for Jimmy Carter, who lost his bid for reelection. With the Reagan administration now in power, the mood at the foundation turned grim. Many of the government programs we advocated were in peril; the Student Press Service reported sympathetically on Democratic efforts to save them. "Budget Plans May Hurt School Desegregation Efforts," read one headline. "Voting Act Extension Causes Controversy," warned another. The cover story for a press service report in late April 1981 was an exposé by me on the Ku Klux Klan Youth Corps-a "segregated Boy Scouts" that was conducting "paramilitary youth camps" throughout the South and West in the early months of the Reagan era. Working the phones and tapping out copy, we were following a liberal political line, which conformed to a view of journalism I had come to in high school, after reading Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, a muckraking exposé on the abysmal working conditions in Chicago's meat-packing industry. Journalism was a forum to agitate for social justice. I took these concerns with me to Berkeley, California, where I enrolled as a freshman in the fall of 1981. I had chosen the University of California at Berkeley specifically because of its long tradition of liberal political activism, beginning with the famed Free Speech Movement of 1964 and culminating in protests against the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s. Yet my first year on the Berkeley campus was not at all what I had anticipated. Rather than a liberal bastion of intellectual tolerance and academic freedom, the campus was-though the phrase hadn't yet been coined-politically correct, sometimes stiflingly so. Many on the faculty, having come of age in the 1960s, adhered to a doctrinaire leftism to which I had never been exposed. Though it is a blunt overgeneralization, the sociology department seemed to me to be filled with socialists, the philosophy department with devotees of Michel Foucault's relativistic deconstructionism. History tended to be taught from the perspective of New Left revisionists, who blamed the Cold War on the United States. In English literature, the Western canon, composed of "dead white European males," was out of fashion. The politically correct culture was even more ubiquitous in the surrounding left-wing city of Berkeley-some called it Berzerkeley-where many of the sandal-clad 1960s campus activists had settled and were now running fiefdoms like the Rent Control Board. The evils of Reagan's anti-Communist policies in Central America, the campaign to establish a Third World College on campus-these were the subjects of endless rants over lattes at Café Roma. As the arms race with the Soviet Union escalated under Reagan, the nuclear weapons labs run by the university in Livermore and Los Alamos were a rallying point for sometimes-violent student protests. Researchers there were branded "fascists." I decorated my dorm room with postcards portraying the Reagans as victims of a nuclear holocaust, but something felt wrong. In my sophomore year, as a cub reporter for the Daily Californian, the student-run newspaper that was widely read both on the sprawling Berkeley campus and in the city, one of the first assignments that I drew, quite by chance, was to cover a campus speech by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's United Nations ambassador and an architect of his hard-line anti-Communist policies in El Salvador and Nicaragua, which countenanced human rights violations throughout the region by our anti-Communist allies. An acerbic, schoolmarmish neoconservative Democrat and former university professor, Kirkpatrick had been invited to deliver the Jefferson Lectures, a distinguished annual series on the history of American political values. As with nearly every campus event in Berkeley, a protest was announced in leaflets that had been stapled onto bulletin boards in the main plaza. When I arrived at the auditorium at the appointed hour, the expected conga line of sign-holding protesters had not materialized. Berkeley's lecture halls were cavernous, and on this warm day in early fall Dwinelle Hall was filled to capacity. I walked into the hushed room and took a seat up front near the platform. Opening my reporter's notebook, I was set to jot down the details of what I expected to be a rather dry academic address. Kirkpatrick was introduced by the mild-mannered Berkeley law school dean, and she approached the podium with a clutch of papers in a hand that looked more like a bird's claw. No sooner had she begun speaking than several dozen protesters, clad in black sheets with white skeletons painted on them, bolted from their seats, repeatedly shouting, "U.S. Out of El Salvador," and "Forty Thousand Dead," a reference to political assassinations by death squads linked to the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military junta. Kirkpatrick stopped speaking, waiting patiently for the din to die down; but as soon as she uttered another word, the chanting commenced, and it grew louder and louder with each recitation. As an exasperated Kirkpatrick pivoted toward the law school dean for assistance, a protester leaped from his seat just offstage and splashed simulated blood on the podium. After several more attempts to be heard with no help from the hapless dean, Kirkpatrick curled her lip, turned on her heels, and surrendered to the mob. The scene shook me deeply: Was the harassment of an unpopular speaker the legacy of the Berkeley-campus Free Speech Movement, when students demanded the right to canvass for any and all political causes on the campus's Sproul Plaza? Wasn't free speech a liberal value? How, I wondered, could this thought police call itself liberal? As I raced back to the threadbare offices of the Daily Cal, where we tapped out stories on half-sheets of paper hunched over manual typewriters, my adrenaline was pumping. I knew I had the day's lead story. For the rest of the academic year, a controversy raged in the faculty senate and within the board of regents, where several of former Governor Reagan's appointees still sat, over whether the campus administration should have done more to secure Kirkpatrick's ability to speak freely. The few outspoken conservatives on the faculty, and the Reagan regents, raised their voices in support of Kirkpatrick's free speech rights. The liberals seemed to me to be defending censorship. Later that year, I declared a major in history with an emphasis on European and American diplomacy. Repelled by the Berkeley left, especially in the months following the Kirkpatrick incident, I gravitated toward the few conservatives on the faculty who had taken up the cudgels against the anti-Kirkpatrick protesters. Through my studies, including seminars with Walter McDougall, a young, mustachioed foreign policy hawk and occasional contributor to conservative intellectual William F. Buckley's National Review, I formed some early ideas about the need for vigilant American defense policies, and under his tutelage I developed a strong anti-Communist viewpoint. Outside the classroom, my political education consisted of devouring copies of Norman Podhoretz's Commentary, the leading monthly magazine of the ex-liberals known as neoconservatives. I stumbled upon an issue of Commentary on a library reading rack and charged off into the stacks of Moffitt Library, where I read back issues for days. Like Podhoretz's famous piece "The Present Danger," Commentary specialized in alarming essays on the Soviet threat, some of them by Kirkpatrick herself. The intellectual vigor and fiery polemics appealed to me more than the foppish, Anglophilic bent of National Review or the American Spectator, the other leading conservative magazines of the day. Commentary seemed to speak to everything I was learning in class at that young age-the need for a strong military was so plain, if you studied history-and also to everything that troubled me about Berkeley's political extremism. I couldn't get enough. I loved writing for the Daily Cal, and I thrived there as a reporter, fitting in easily with the brainy newspaper crowd. In my junior year, I was elected by the staff to a top-level news-editing post. I won election because I had worked hard breaking stories, including a series of investigative articles proving that a university vice president had misappropriated university resources to benefit a private company he ran on the side. The articles forced his resignation. I was a respected reporter on the staff, and as an aspiring young journalist exposing corruption, I was gratified to win my first scalp. With my new post came a seat on the paper's editorial board and the opportunity to write signed op-ed columns. For some weeks, the editorial page editor had been after me to contribute a column for the paper's international opinion page. The October 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, where American forces overthrew a Marxist-leaning regime, seemed like an obvious chance to hone my polemical skills. Inspired by a McDougall seminar on "just war" theory, and a bracing op-ed in the New York Times by right-wing columnist William Safire, I sat in Café Roma and scribbled out in longhand a ringing endorsement of the "liberation" of Grenada from the Soviet sphere of influence that steamrolled over legitimate arguments against the invasion. To me, the column was an academic exercise; I hadn't realized that it would be received in Berkeley as a political thunderclap. While I wasn't knowingly playing the part of provocateur, when the column was published on a Monday morning, all hell broke loose. By the early 1980s, most of the thirty-thousand-plus Berkeley student body had no interest in carrying on the scruffy activist traditions of the 1960s. They were tall and blond and from places like Orange County and had keg parties at their frats. Or they were the studious children of immigrants, devoted to their engineering books. While most students seemed unconcerned with events in Grenada, the military operation was deeply unpopular with Berkeley's small but very vocal population of activists, who saw it as an example of rapacious American imperialism and had taken to the streets with flag-burning protests. My column stoked the flames of the local fires, and I rather unintentionally became the focus for the protesters' rage. The main opposition to my column came from some lefty faculty members, like Charlie Schultze, the award-winning chemist who was always protesting at the Livermore weapons lab, and the city of Berkeley's political establishment-Mayor Gus Newport, an avowed socialist, and liberal Democratic Congressman Ron Dellums, whose staff had close relations with Maurice Bishop's ousted Grenadan regime. There was opposition, too, within the Daily Cal, an off-campus cooperative run independently of the university, led by the general manager, Marty Rabkin, one of those '60s types who had come to Berkeley and never left. "How could you?" an indignant Marty said to me in his office as we watched the desecration of the American flag in the streets below. How could I? I wasn't the one burning the flag. Though critics, including Rabkin, were outraged by what they saw as the grave injustices of U.S. foreign policy in Grenada, I didn't see their point of view, just as I had been unable to credit the position of the anti-Kirkpatrick demonstrators, who believed that her policies condoned murder. All I understood was that I was being targeted in a campaign by the left to recall me from my post as editor for speaking my mind. I remember rushing by, feeling vulnerable and turning my face away in embarrassment, as huge rolls of brown paper petitions against me were unfurled on Sproul Plaza. To me, liberals were flatly and unapologetically advocating censorship of opinions they considered illegitimate and immoral, a rerun of the Kirkpatrick incident. The argument went: An editor at a newspaper with a 150-year progressive tradition should not be allowed to publish such obscene views. I was branded a warmonger, a fascist, and worse. I was determined to stand my ground and fight, all the more so because, as I saw it, the fight was not about Grenada, but about the First Amendment. Viewing it this way, as a moral rather than an ideological struggle, I became as self-righteous and rigid as my critics, who in my eyes were not just wrong but un-American. I survived the threatened recall only on a technicality. The bylaws governing the cooperative had no provision for removing editors, and they could be amended only at the end of the academic year when new editors were elected. Continuing on as editor, I accepted and even embraced the controversy I incited, willfully doing everything I could to enhance my outsider status. I baited my liberal adversaries, publishing a diatribe against a board of regents proposal to strengthen affirmative action programs. Meanwhile, every editorial decision I made was seen by many on the staff as motivated by an evil right-wing plot. Being an outspoken conservative in Berkeley got me noticed, which I relished. I imagined myself as David against the liberal Goliath. By the end of my junior year, I had become both a hated-and, I'm sorry to say, something of a hateful-figure in the newsroom. I demonized my enemies on the staff, led by a bubbly blond from Pasadena and a brooding Hispanic fellow, both of whom I openly and wrongly scorned as witless affirmative action hires. I was also caught in an embarrassing lie. A small cadre of loyalists had stuck by me through the Grenada controversy. As a way of building up my power base, when a problem arose in a story one of them had written after it was published, I sought to tarnish the reputation of one of my foes, who had edited the piece. I told the editor in chief that the vice chancellor had called to complain about the story. She immediately called the university official and found out the truth: He hadn't called. When the editor confronted me about the lie, I froze, speechless, and walked away. Soon enough, everyone in the newsroom knew I had lied. Though my poor cadre knew about my lie and voted for me anyway, I lost overwhelmingly in my campaign to be elected editor in chief. For good measure, the bylaws were amended to provide for the removal of editors on a majority vote of the staff: the Brock Amendment. Though my discomfort with the extremist elements in Berkeley was understandable and in some ways valid, it was distorted by an emotional overreaction to the Grenada controversy. Like most political arguments in college, the episode had a distinctly personal edge. Rather than settling in some reasonable middle ground between left and right, my feelings of persecution caused me to swing to the right. To hold myself together during the campaign to recall me, I dug in my heels, assumed a warlike posture, and closed my mind and my heart to all things left and liberal for good. Moreover, I now viewed politics as a knife fight, my critics as blood enemies. My still-nascent ideological commitments acquired a vengeful overlay: I'll get them. At the same time, I was able to find comfort-a sense of belonging and a measure of stature-in the sectarian right-wing Berkeley campus underground that rose up to defend and embrace me. In addition to historian Walter McDougall, there was the witty political scientist Paul Seabury, whose lectures were sometimes protested because he was a member of Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The bald, bespectacled Seabury was a smoker, and after class I would sit with him as he indulged himself and told me of his political journey from left to right, in reaction to the radical anti-Americanism and what he called "the fascistic style" of the 1960s left. I also became a research assistant to Aaron Wildavsky, a renowned neoconservative social theorist, on his book The Beleaguered Presidency, in which he argued that the Democrats were becoming "a party that delegitimized the nation's second-largest constituency-white, working, Christian males." I romanticized these faculty conservatives as stalwart defenders of constitutional protections, civility, and tolerance, never once wondering if they might have jumped into the fray to defend Jeane Kirkpatrick and me for ideological reasons. With McDougall, Seabury, and Wildavsky taking me under their wings, happy to have a bright new recruit with a sharp pen in the cause, I settled comfortably into conservatism. I fell easily under the spell of my surrogate father figures, as though anyone who gave me attention could dictate my beliefs. From them I found the moral and ideological clarity, the critical affirmation and acceptance, and the firm sense of who I was that my fragile psyche yearned for. I slapped the label of the entire conservative movement on my lapel, gave it authority over my being, without even understanding what it meant. Stumbling into a fight over Grenada at the age of twenty, I came out of it playing the role of right-wing ideologue-right-wing robot, really-to the hilt. I jumped on a conservative trajectory that would cause me to live my life along a certain but wrong course for the next fifteen years. Thunderstruck on the Right by Michael Tomasky My sister-in-law, a historian and researcher in alternative medicine, once told me of a doctoral dissertation she'd happened across in which the writer interviewed a number of committed liberals and conservatives for the purpose of drawing conclusions about their governing emotional equipment. Liberals, the student found, feel most at home with guilt. Conservatives, as you might expect, don't have much truck with that; instead, they do anger. It may be hard to call these findings shocking ones, and I do not know whether the candidate's advisers concluded that he or she had sufficiently advanced the literature so as to earn a doctorate. But I can say from personal experience that the liberalism-guilt correlation rings true, and, after reading David Brock's Blinded by the Right, I can certify on the strength of Brock's eyewitness--and often eye-popping--account that conservatives really do anger. Anger as trope; anger as strategy; anger as immutable biological condition; and anger just because it's fun. Yes, we knew this. But we didn't know it the way Brock knows it. Let me put it this way. Throughout the Clinton era, I read every major newspaper and all the magazines and a lot of the websites and most of the pertinent books; I didn't think there was much more for me to learn. But once Blinded by the Right kicks into gear, there is a fact, anecdote or reminiscence about the right's feral hatred of the Clintons every ten pages or so that is absolutely mind-boggling. And, as often as not, these stories are also about the rancid hypocrisy (usually sexual) that underlay, or probably even helped cause, the hatred. In sum: You cannot fully understand this fevered era without reading this book. The question you may fairly ask is the one some people are already asking: Given the source--Brock was the capital's most famous conservative journalistic hit man before quite famously commencing a mea culpa routine in 1997--can we believe it? The short answer is yes, mostly. The long answer requires that we start, as Oscar Hammerstein III put it, at the very beginning. The book dances back and forth between exposé and memoir. David Brock was raised in New Jersey, the adopted son of a mother who paid too much mind to what the neighbors thought and a father so rigidly conservative that he did something, as Brock notes, that even Pat Buchanan never felt moved to do: He left the Catholic Church to protest the liberal reforms of Vatican II and worshiped in a sect overseen by the profoundly right-wing French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. It was partly for the sake of agitating his taciturn father that Brock's first political stirrings were liberal (Bobby Kennedy) to moderate (Jimmy Carter, for whom he secretly persuaded his mother to vote). The family moved to Dallas, an inhospitable milieu in general for a Kennedy acolyte, not least one who was coming to terms with the fact that the sight of his fellow boys disrobing after gym class did more to quicken his pulse than, say, a stolen glance in the direction of the décolletage of the Cowboys cheerleaders. Hating Dallas and still seeking to traduce the old man, for college he chose, of all lamentable destinations, Berkeley. There, Brock expected to drop anchor in a tranquil moorage of like-minded, tolerant, liberal bien pensants. Instead, he ran head-on into the multicultural, academic left, a bird of altogether different plumage. When Jeane Kirkpatrick came to campus to speak, and protesters would not let her utter a sentence as one of them unloaded a bucket of simulated blood on the podium, that was enough for Brock. Soon he was writing columns in the Daily Californian applauding the "liberation" of Grenada and submitting an essay to the Policy Review, a publication of the Heritage Foundation, on campus Marxism. The Wall Street Journal adapted that piece as an Op-Ed, which caught the eye of John Podhoretz, son of Norman, and Midge Decter, and then an editor at Insight, a magazine put out by the Washington Times. Podhoretz offered him a job, and Brock was off to Washington. The story of Brock's ideological conversion is important, because it reflects a pattern with regard to several of his comrades we meet later in that it was at once both shockingly superficial and utterly fervent. Forget Burke or Oakeshott or Hayek or even Russell Kirk; Brock admits he hadn't read a single thing beyond some issues of Commentary he tracked down in the library. "I knew nothing of the movement's history," he writes. Joe McCarthy, Goldwater, Nixon--all were mysteries to him, for the most part. His politics were nothing more than a reaction to his personal experience. While the same cannot fairly be said of the movement's intellectuals, from Brock's telling it was indeed true of many of the activists, operatives and media babblers. Their conservatism was purely an emotional or psychological response to their immediate environment. In the most extreme case, Brock writes that his former close friend Laura Ingraham, one of the bombastic blondes of cable television, didn't "own a book or regularly read a newspaper." But as we have seen, in our age, ignorance is no barrier to expertise, particularly on cable television. Shallow though it may have been, Brock's conversion was virtually consummate. I say virtually because there were some matters on which he claims he never drank the Kool-Aid. He had little taste, he says, for the racist shock antics of the Dartmouth Review crowd; he quietly backed abortion rights; and, of course, on the gay question, he marched to a very different drummer than that of the movement to which he belonged. Of parties at the home of archconservative fomenter Grover Norquist, who hung a portrait of Lenin on his living room wall and often quoted Vladimir Ilyich's dictum to "probe with bayonets, looking for weakness," Brock writes that he was "ill at ease" at these gatherings; "unsure of how to handle the issue of my sexuality, I drifted in late and out early, usually accompanied by a woman colleague," traversing the room "like a zombie." Nevertheless, he wanted nothing more than their approval, and he put his remaining misgivings, and the odd homophobic joke, to the side. This brings us to the book's second vital point about the winger psyche. The need to belong--and, specifically, to belong to a self-styled minority that felt itself embattled, thumbing its nose at the larger, contaminated culture--is a constant motif of Blinded by the Right, and it becomes clear over the course of the book that it was this convulsed emotional state, even more than ideology, that was, and I suppose still is, the real binding glue among the right. For Brock, it began with his trying to shock his father with Jimmy Carter and Berkeley; it went on to Brock's seeking to vilify the campus lefties. It was present, too, among many of the movement types he befriended: "There was electricity on the right, the same sense of bravely flouting convention--of subverting the dominant culture--that I had first felt in Texas and then at Berkeley." It was by the time of the 1992 election, when this mindset joined hands with a group of men--and their many millions of dollars--who couldn't accept that the GOP was losing the White House to such a man as Bill Clinton, that it went from being a kind of batty nuisance to a well-oiled agitprop apparatus to, ultimately, a threat to the Constitution. Brock was by then ensconced at The American Spectator, which became in time the most virulent right-wing magazine in America, willing to publish any thinly sourced rumor as long as it made a Clinton look bad, and the home of the Arkansas Project, the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded operation that sought to dig up any Clinton dirt it could find. Brock sharpened his knife first on Anita Hill. With Laurence and Ricky Silberman holding his hand--he was a circuit judge in Washington and a member of the hard-right Federalist Society; she had worked for Clarence Thomas with Hill--Brock could scarcely believe how quickly and easily previously unreleased affidavits and so on fell into his hands from GOP Congressional staffers. Brock knew intuitively what he was supposed to do with this material, and it wasn't journalism. It was character assassination, and not only of Hill. Of one Democratic Senate staffer, he wrote that the man was "known for cutting ethical corners...to achieve desired results." Brock admits he knew nothing about the man. He made no effort to contact sources who might have had different interpretations (and obviously not Hill herself); he double-checked nothing; he twisted the hearing record to make Hill look like a vengeful harridan who was, in his infamous phrase, "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty." But it was good enough for the Spectator, which billed it, natch, as investigative journalism. Rush Limbaugh began reading sections of the piece on the air. Brock was put on to Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, the literary agents of choice for the hard right. He signed a book contract with the Free Press, then run by archconservative Erwin Glikes and Adam Bellow, son of Saul. The Real Anita Hill hit the bestseller lists. The right-wing newspeak machine, now such a fact of political life, was born. Next up, the famous "Troopergate" story (again in the Spectator), about Arkansas state policemen supposedly setting up sexual liaisons for Governor Clinton. Brock followed the old MO--no independent sourcing, printing rumors, etc.--to the same triumphant effect. And this time he found to his surprise a willing abettor. Though a few mainstream news organizations did shoot down some specific charges that didn't check out, the chief response of a largely panting Washington press corps ("I was astonished to see how easy it was to suck in CNN") was for more, more, more. Brock became a bigger star still. Hillary Clinton was the next quarry, and Adam Bellow had obligingly put a $1 million price on her head in the form of Brock's advance. But Hillary proved to be Brock's Waterloo--as she has been, incidentally, for several other men who were supposed to steamroller her (Starr, Whitewater committee chair D'Amato, candidate Giuliani, candidate Lazio...). By then, Brock was starting to develop a conscience. In 1994, Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer's book on the Thomas-Hill matter, Strange Justice, had hit the stands. It proved to everyone in the world but hard-shell rightists that Thomas was indeed a ravenous porn enthusiast and that Hill, in all likelihood, was the truthful one. When even Ricky Silberman, who had been Brock's source and cheerleader while Brock was writing the Anita Hill book, seemed to acknowledge privately that Thomas had lied, Brock was shaken. By the time he got around to Hillary, Brock was determined to write an actual book. ("I began to relish the complexity of my subject. I realized I had never known what journalism was.") I cannot here convey the full flavor of the contempt his old comrades regarded him with as a result: the sideways glances, the calls not returned, the party invites not received--and, now that he wasn't "on the team," in the argot, the jokes about and denunciations of his sexuality, suddenly delivered within earshot. He was not supposed to commit journalism or write what he thought. He was supposed to kill Clintons. Period. Once he stopped that, his life on the right was finished. David Brock gave up anger and turned to guilt. In the process, he flings open a most illuminating window on this hideous circus. Here is Newt Gingrich, vowing "to say the word 'Monica' in every speech" even while "conducting his own illicit affair." We see Georgia Congressman Bob Barr plotting to bring the troopers to testify on Capitol Hill to expose Clinton's adultery--the same Barr who, interestingly enough, married his third wife within one month of divorcing his second. We hear Jack Romanos, the head of Simon & Schuster, telling Brock, as he signed the million-dollar Hillary book deal--without even writing a proposal!--that the only thing he wanted to know before OK'ing the money was whether Hillary was a lesbian. We eavesdrop on the publisher of the Spectator asking Brock, "Can't you find any more women to attack?" We read of George Conway, one of the lawyers who played a crucial role in pushing Paula Jones's story, admitting that privately he didn't believe Jones's allegation at all but that her case must be pressed nonetheless because the point was to force a situation in which Clinton would have to lie under oath about extramarital sex. We witness Ted Olson, a member of the bar and now this country's Solicitor General, telling Brock that while he believed Vince Foster had committed suicide, the Spectator should still run a trashy, unsourced piece about Foster's "murder" to keep the pressure on the Administration until the Spectator could shake loose another "scandal." Anecdotes like these spill out of this book. And so we return to the question: Why believe this man? I was not persuaded by every assertion about his emotional state in 1992 or 1995; there could be some after-the-fact varnishing going on there. But as for what he saw, and whom he saw doing it, there are three very good reasons to believe every word. First is the simple standard of factual recall. Brock names names, places, dates, the food and wine consumed, the color of the draperies. Perry Mason would love to have called Brock as a witness and watched as poor Hamilton Burger buried his vanquished head in his hands. Second, quite simply, the writing has about it the tenor of veracity and candor. Brock comes clean on things he has no contemporary motive to come clean on, like a lie he told back at Berkeley in an attempt to discredit a journalistic foe. That strikes me as an act of expiation, not public relations. And third, most persuasive to me, is this: You would think the right's screamers would be engaging right now in flamboyant public harangues about Brock's duplicity and so forth. But to date, I've scarcely heard a peep. Admittedly, it's early yet, as the book is just out. If Blinded by the Right ascends the bestseller lists, I expect at that point that the screamers will decide they have to deal with it. Until then, my hunch is that they hope they can bury it with their silence. That tells me that David Brock, while no longer right, is, in fact, right as rain. What would make an avid Clinton-hating attack journalist have a "road to Damascus" experience and cause him to completely change his point of view? Why would he denounce the A-list conservatives who made him, and instead ally himself to people close to Bill Clinton? All these questions and more are answered in David Brock's memoir Blinded By the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. David Brock, a writer in Washington, D.C., is the author of The Real Anita Hill and The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. He has written for Esquire, New York, Rolling Stone, Talk, and the New York Times and Washington Post op-ed pages. He appears regularly on television talk shows, and his work has been featured on National Public Radio. Right and Wrong David Brock Went After Liberals With Zeal. He Made Money. Friends. Then, He Says, He Had An Attack of Conscience. By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, February 26, 2002; Page C01 David Brock is a liar. And a character assassin. And a turncoat. And a partisan hatchet man. And a lonely, tortured soul. And a practitioner of malicious journalism. And a bizarre guy. That, at least, is how he describes himself. The reporter who savaged Anita Hill and told the world about Paula Jones has written a book about his seduction and eventual excommunication by the conservative movement. Brock is hard on himself in "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," but he also snipes at many people who were his friends, sometimes mocking their private lives in the process. Sitting in the living room of his antique-filled, 19th-century Georgetown home, the one he bought with all the muckraking money, Brock, 39, wrestles with the obvious questions: How does anyone know he's telling the truth now? Hasn't he shredded his reputation beyond repair? Why did he go negative on himself? "I was just sort of devastated," Brock says. "Every time I felt I'd gotten to the nub of things, there was another layer to peel. The only way I could understand what happened to me was to write it down. "I probably could have skated by. No one forced me to make these disclosures. No one caught me in a fabrication. . . . I just didn't want to live with that on my conscience." Now, he says, he's a liberal Democrat who voted for Al Gore -- and is bent on exposing what he sees as the excesses of his former political allies. In the process, he has produced a chilling portrait, if it can be believed, of a partisan attack machine. It would be easy to conclude that Brock's new career is renouncing his previous career. He has, after all, been apologizing for some time. In a 1998 Esquire piece in which he was photographed shirtless and tied to a tree, he apologized to President Clinton for Brock's "Troopergate" article on alleged sexual high jinks in Arkansas. Last June, after a Talk magazine excerpt from the new book, he said he was sorry to Anita Hill. Back in the early '90s, of course, Brock doggedly defended his work against those who called him a smear artist. But now, he says, "I wasn't really functioning as a journalist. I was functioning more as a political operative using a journalistic forum." Missions to Destroy From the time he arrived in Washington in 1986, Brock sought refuge in the bosom of the conservative movement. Smart, ambitious and tightly wound, he struggled to balance his life as a closeted gay man with the friendships of political and media warriors -- some of whom, he says, would make anti-gay remarks. When his career imploded and the right abandoned him, Brock lost more than his professional footing. The social life he had constructed for himself unraveled. "I didn't understand how much of my identity was wrapped up in being a right-wing hit man, that the repercussions would affect my entire being," he says. But there may have been other motivations behind his slashing approach. "There was a very important part of him that really wanted to make money," says Ricky Silberman, a conservative activist and close friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who did some of the editing on Brock's book "The Real Anita Hill." "He always talked about what publishers wanted, what would sell." One thing is clear: Brock has long felt like an outsider. As he came to grips with his homosexuality, he was ridiculed at his Paramus, N.J., high school for being different. At Berkeley, where he was editor of the Daily Californian, the previously liberal Brock moved right while rebelling against the school's left-wing culture. He barely survived a recall effort -- but not before getting caught in an embarrassing lie about a made-up complaint from a university official. (Later, when he was living in Washington, Brock broke up with his boyfriend after being caught lying about the fact that he was adopted.) He began his Beltway career at Insight, the conservative magazine affiliated with the Washington Times, followed by a stint at the Heritage Foundation. Next stop was the American Spectator, the conservative monthly that Brock now describes as having been "aggressively homophobic." "I felt too gay for my straight right-wing peers," he writes. "And I was too closeted and too right-wing to allow myself to connect with almost anybody else, gay or straight, which meant no real friends, no dating and only furtive sex." Along came the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings in which Thomas defended himself against Hill's charges of sexual harassment. Brock allied himself with Silberman and other Thomas supporters -- including officials in the first Bush White House -- and set out to demonize Hill in the Spectator as incompetent, "kooky," "perverse" and, most famously, "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty." Socially, he craved "the kinship that the Thomas camp seemed willing to provide me as a way of filling my tortured need for friendship and affection and acceptance." His view of the Thomas-Hill clash was "black and white, good and evil." The article made a huge splash, leading to Brock's book trashing Hill. He found himself being quoted by Rush Limbaugh, invited to fancy parties and dinners, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Robert Novak, Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol and Arianna Huffington. Brock reveled in his sudden fame. He was "bouncing out of bed in the morning on a mission to destroy the left," he says. "I was thrilled to be embraced by the conservative establishment. I was fairly young and ambitious. I thought I was happy." One of Brock's conservative sources put him in touch with four Arkansas state troopers who alleged that they helped procure women for Bill Clinton when he was governor. Brock was wary of their tawdry tale but wrote it anyway for the Spectator, complete with every disgusting anecdote he could collect. "I did what was politically useful," he says. Clinton "was a Democrat, therefore he was a target." The Clinton sex wars had begun. Brock's 1993 piece mentioned an Arkansas woman named Paula, who one trooper said had offered to be Clinton's girlfriend. This prompted an angry denial by Paula Jones, who eventually sued Clinton. Brock himself had trouble believing Jones's account but says that "if I could get any credit for discovering Paula Jones, I was happy to get credit." The Spectator, whose circulation was zooming from 30,000 to 300,000, boosted his salary to $125,000. But the man who was exploiting the alleged sexual misbehavior of others was still struggling with his own sexuality. He was "scared stiff" when gay newspapers threatened to disclose his homosexuality. He decided to emerge from the closet in a series of interviews with this reporter in 1994. His method was to vilify New York Times columnist Frank Rich in the process. Rich, who knew nothing of Brock's sexuality, had assailed Brock as a "misogynist." Brock, fortified by a few shots of vodka, acknowledged his sexuality while accusing Rich of conducting a "thinly veiled outing." Brock now admits he was unfair to Rich, seizing "an opportunity to turn the tables on the liberals and try to portray myself as having been a victim and try to rally conservative support. And it worked." Brock became "a kind of gay right-wing poster boy." He slid further into the journalistic gutter by mounting an attack on two reporters, Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer, when they published a competing book on the Thomas-Hill imbroglio. For one thing, he tried to bully a friend of Thomas's into retracting her story (of having seen a Playboy pinup in Thomas's kitchen) by threatening to reveal derogatory information from an old divorce case. Brock also tried to knock down Abramson and Mayer's report that Thomas had frequented an X-rated video store. Brock says that Thomas confirmed the video store rentals through Mark Paoletta, a former Bush White House lawyer. Paoletta has called Brock's account "simply not true." Despite what he believed about Thomas and pornographic videos, and knowing this made Hill's testimony more plausible, Brock dismissed the charge. "I put a lie in print," he says. Brock later got a photograph from Thomas, signed: "To David, With admiration and affection, Clarence." Brock's new book includes a eureka moment in which Brock spoke by phone with his friend Ricky Silberman after the Abramson-Mayer account of Thomas's movie-rental habits. "He did it, didn't he?" Silberman is quoted as saying. That, says Silberman, "was made up out of whole cloth. I never in a million years could have, would have or did say what he said I said." When she heard Brock was writing a book that would castigate conservatives, she says, "it never occurred to me that he would try to get me. I just don't understand it." Loss of Faith Riding high and full of himself -- his answering machine message said, "I'm out trying to bring down the president" -- Brock was drawn into the Spectator's "Arkansas Project." Financed by conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife, the $2.5 million effort used private eyes and dubious Arkansas sources to dig up dirt on Clinton, with some charges as wild as drug-running and murder and using prison inmates for sexual gratification. Brock thought many of the charges were baloney. But by now he had a new and more lucrative target: Hillary Rodham Clinton. His earlier notoriety had helped him land a $1 million book contract to investigate the first lady. But Brock was shaken by his loss of faith in Thomas, conflicted about producing another hatchet job. He spent months in a "drunken funk." He developed a bad case of acne. He crashed his Mercedes. Still, he soldiered on. "I wanted the million bucks," he admits. Depressed and losing weight, Brock produced a somewhat sympathetic Hillary biography in 1996 that bitterly disappointed his friends on the right. Disgusted, he found himself denouncing another book by former FBI agent Gary Aldrich, who alleged -- apparently based on nothing but a convoluted conversation with Brock -- that Clinton was sneaking out for late-night trysts at the Marriott. Conservatives were appalled. The party invitations vanished. Scaife wanted Brock fired, and the Spectator eventually dropped him. New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, who had given Brock his first job at Insight, called him a "disgrace" who was engaged in "almost boundless hypocrisy." Silberman counseled against his planned apology to Clinton in Esquire. "David, you don't want to write this story so focused on how your feelings are hurt," she recalls telling him. "It's just not serious." A New York Post gossip columnist suggested Brock had apologized because he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton's former press secretary, which he wasn't. The former peddler of junk journalism now felt like the target of a hate campaign. Brock felt used, but he realized he had used his former pals as well. He soon defected to the other side, striking up a friendship with Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal and trying to help prevent the president's impeachment -- an effort that had been set in motion by Brock's reporting on Paula Jones. The right, he now believed, was abusing the political and legal system. Brock is angry, as the book makes abundantly obvious, though it's less clear why he includes little digs about one commentator's extramarital affairs and another's talk of preferred positions in bed. It all seems so long ago now -- the nutty and slutty business, the endless sexual allegations, the impeachment, the anger, the grand juries, the screaming cable matches -- which is perhaps why few of Brock's former friends want to talk about him. "I'm not much interested in David Brock," says commentator Ann Coulter. Radio host Laura Ingraham declines to discuss Brock. Internet gossip Matt Drudge says no comment. Says Wlady Pleszczynski, the Spectator's former managing editor: "I don't know who would be interested in his book beyond a few fanatics on the left and those of us who knew him and worked with him. It's such a sad slide. I don't know what he really believes in anymore." Which raises the unavoidable question: Can Brock rehabilitate himself by denouncing those who helped him to prominence? Clasping a mug of coffee in his fabulously furnished living room, Brock looks away. "I guess I ultimately decided the betrayal that's involved here is the betrayal of politics, as opposed to the betrayal of personal friendships or loyalties," he says slowly. "I was pretty restrained, given what one could have done." What will he do now? Brock finally seems comfortable in his personal life, sharing the home with his partner, James Alefantis, and a large gray poodle. But his career prospects are unclear. "I have no plan at the moment," Brock says. He's not sure if he can still practice journalism. He remains a symbol of a nasty era in American politics, a sinner seeking forgiveness, surrounded by the wreckage of his own ambition. Brooklyn, NY : How influenced do you think the current president and administration are by the right-wing clique you describe in your book? David Brock: Many of the characters in the book who helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and were the leaders of the anti-Clinton movement are currently serving in this administation. The top legal talent in the White House and several cabinet departments is drawn from the Federalist Society, the powerful network of right-wing lawyers that I discuss in the book. They are really influential in decisions ranging from judicial selection to regulatory matters. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pasadena, CA : How has the radical right movement you discuss in your book adapted and changed during the Bush 2 administration? David Brock: The main change is that the influence of the right wing is now much more hidden. The Christian Coalition, for example, kept a low profile at the Republican convention in 2000, yet spent more money supporting Bush than they had any other president. Bush has tried to put a more moderate face on the same conservative policies that the party has pursued since Reagan, and Bush is the most popular president in the conservative movement of any president since I've been in Washington in the last 16 years. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sally Miller : What needs to be done to make it where this dirt in politics will cease and civility be returned to politics and to the American voter. Or do you see it continuing.....or getting worse? David Brock: I think it has abated for the moment, but it hasn't gone away. Since the Republicans have come to office and control the government, Washington has become a more civil place, because the conservative attack machine is happy, and therefore dormant. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sally Miller, Albertson, NC : Do you feel you need to apologize to the Clintons, or have you already done so? and why do you think the right wants to use "such hate" and character assasinations to destroy their opponents? David Brock: Yes, I publically apologized to President Clinton in 1998 when impeachment was in the air as a way not only of expressing my regrets to him, but also as a way of highlighting the dangers of impeachment to the country. If you look at modern history, conservatism is fueled by hate, because conservatism only thrives when it has an enemy. For years, the enemy was the Soviet Union, but when the Soviet Union collapsed the Republicans began a witchhunt against domestic political enemies. This is what the Clintons got caught up in. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richardson TX : What is it about Clinton that the right Wing Hate? David Brock: It's a complex phenomenon. One reason is that Clinton was the most threatening Democrat to come along in at least 2 decades. Another is that the Clintons seem to stand for progressive social values that the right wing despises - for example, Hillary Clinton was the first First Lady to have had her own career before coming to the White House. The Arkansas Clinton-haters hated Clinton because of his views on racial relations. And then I think for some who are accusing the Clintons of doing the very things they themselves were doing, the hatred was a case of psychological projection - an orgy of self-hatred. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Noblesville, Indiana : Mr. Brock, I would like to preface my question with a comment. Thank you for having the moral fortitude to tell the truth. My queston? How does it feel to be attacked by people in the right wing? David Brock: Oddly enough, by enlarge the right wing has not yet attacked this book. Perhaps they've already attacked me in every way they can in the last few years. They all know that this book is true, but I'm not sure why that would stop them from denying it anyway. The attacks when they come won't bother me, because I have to consider the source. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New Rochelle NY : Did the gang of Scaife know you were gay and did it affect the way you were around them? I am concerned that you needed to hide your true self in front of people as mean as Ann Coulter. David Brock: I came out of the closet in the middle of my Spectator tenure, so obviously at some point Scaife did know, but the conservatives didn't care about that so long as I was politically useful. For years I did hide my true self from my friends. When I came out, Coulter handed me a stack of anti-gay "conversion literature". -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Midland, MI : Why do you think the Washington Post chose a writer from the Conservative American Spectator, which you criticize in your book, to review your book? David Brock: I'm not sure that they knew of his background with the American Spectator, which is clearly a conflict of interest. I think they chose a gay conservative to give them cover for a hatchet job review. Unfortunately for them, the hatchet job was bumbled. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- spartanburg sc : Would you say that there was an attempt to overthrow the government of U.S? Using lawyers and drumed up scandals, instead of a gun. David Brock: Yes. In the book, I describe a dinner meeting that I attended in the fall of 1997 of 30 or so conservative movement leaders who were plotting to drum up political support to impeach Bill Clinton. This was 5 months before anyone had heard the name Monica Lewinsky. The talk at the dinner was that the constitutional threshhold of evidence for impeachment didn't matter; it was only a matter of "political will" of the right. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Norton, Vermont : Why are you trying to destroy Republicans? David Brock: I'm not trying to destroy Republicans. I think many Republicans and even consevative readers in the country ought to know the truth about the hypocritical conservative elite that leads them in Washington. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Arlington, VA : Why are women like Ingraham and Coulter so anti-feminist when they have reeped many benefits of the feminist movement? David Brock: Having known both Ann and Laura well, I have to say that I do not think their anti-feminism is much more than a lucrative marketing device. It's a way to be different, to stand out from other writers and commentators without doing any work. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lansing, MI : Many liberals feel that the mainstream media has been leaning to the right. The Washington Post and NYT was so cirtical of President Clinton and has not been of Bush. Is there a conservative conspiracy within the mainstream press? Or are they merely bending over backward trying to appear balanced in response to the right-wing's "liberal bias" criticism? David Brock: Yes, I think the mainstream press is at times intimidated by the very vocal right wing critics. The New York Times and especially the Washington Post seem to have a vested interest in a negative charicature of the Clintons, and therefore they seem unwilling to acknowledge the extent of the conspiracy against the Clintons. For example, the Post did not report on the Arkansas Project, which I detail in my book, until after Clinton was impeached. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunderland : Mr. Brock, will the paperback edition of "Blinded" have an index? And if there are no plans, I hope you will consider it. David Brock: We will consider it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FORT PIERCE, FL : DO YOU FEEL THE TACTICS OF THE 90'S HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THIS ATMOSPHERE OF NON DISSENT ON THE WAR. WHERE PEOPLE WHO ARE PARTRIOTIC MUTE THEIR DOUBTS FOR FEAR OF BEING ATTACKED BY THE MEDIA> David Brock: Yes, I think so. You can see what happened to Tom Daschle when he broached legitimate questions about the administration's strategy. The Republicans ran ads comparing him to Saddam Hussein - a dirty trick right out of Newt Gingrich's playbook. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hartford CT : What specific connection did Ted Olson have to Scaife and to the Arkansas Project? David Brock: There was a meeting at Ted Olson's law office in late 1993 to discuss the Arkansas project just as it was getting off the ground. Later, Olson attended various dinner meetings at which Arkansas Project matters were discussed. Then Olson played a very key role in trying to cover up the Arkansas Project by firing Spectator publisher Ron Burr when Burr called for a fraud audit of the Arkansas Project. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hot Springs, AR : 1. Is Brock now actually claiming that there was NEVER ANY corruption with the use of state troopers and other officials in the Arkansas state government ?? David Brock: The troopers were not credible sources - therefore it's difficult to know what the truth was. Unbeknownst to me, the troopers were paid to talk to me by one of Newt Gingrich's money men. Later, when they were placed under oath in the Paula Jones sexual harrassment case, two of the troopers took back everything they told me. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Salt Lake City, Utah : How did your disaffection with the conservative right come about? Did you have a conservative home life growing up? How do you feel now about such issues as homosexuality, abortion, and women's rights? David Brock: Yes, I was brought up in a conservative home. My father was a Pat Buchanan-type Republican. I broke with the right in three stages. The first was realizing that I was a fraud. The second was looking hard at the character of those around me. And the third stage was rejecting the ideological fanaticism that was driving it all. I always was a social liberal, but I subordinated those views to get ahead in the conservative movement. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bay City, MI : Hi David, I just wanted to say thanks for coming clean. It took Lee Atwater to be lying on his death bed before he finally came clean about all the cruel slander and such that he had heaped on the American public in order to further his and his parties cause. My question is, what happened to gentlemen's rules? Also, how is it that Newt Gingerich is able to stir the pot the way he did about President Clinton and his sexual escapades and yet he is embroiled in his own promiscuous affair, and he just flat out walks away from it all. Thanks again David Brock: Soon after Gingrich became speaker, I was privy to talk in his inner circle that Gingrich was vulnerable on his own personal life. So when Gingrich was leading the impeachment drive, it almost seemed an act of self-destruction. Unfortunately, it wasn't until he left office that the press reported what everybody knew to be true about him - that he was having an affair with a congressional aide during the entire time he was screaming about Monica. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- St. Louis, MO : A question from one who refers to himself as left-of-center, not liberal: So you're saying you were a former conservative and, if I have this right, you admit lying in previous publications to suit the right wing cause. What makes you think that simply because you've burned your bridges to the right that we have any use for you? In essence, you lied on the record. Anything you have to say from here on out will be tainted by that valid accusation. One thing we left-of-centers learned from the 2000 election is that you have to take-no-prisoners if you're playing to win. You're a horse with a lame leg. Counterpoint? David Brock: I understand that what I'm saying now inevitably raises credibility questions, but I think that what I'm doing is more honorable than concealing my past, sweeping it under the rug and moving on. This is a voluntary act on my part, and I think if you read the book you'll be able to see that it is a credible account, just as other reviewers have concluded. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wahington, DC : In the confirmatin hearings this past year for South Carolina District Court Judge Terry Wooten you alleged he improperly reviewed FBI files to dig up dirt on a woman accusing Clarence Thomas of harassment during his confirmation hearings. After FBI interviews, it was shown that you had lied about these allegations and Judge Wooten was confirmed. Why should anyone trust you now when it has been proven conclusively that you will lie in order to get in the headlines? David Brock: The FBI investigation of Judge Wooten was inconclusive. My allegations were not disproven. It was a matter of Wooten's word against mine, so the FBI couldn't resolve it. I made these allegations about Wooten 8 months ago publically. I have all the details in this book, and I have yet to hear from him or anyone representing him disputing the account. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BOCA RATON, FL : WHAT YOU DID HAS CAUSED THE CLINTON'S SECOND TERM IN OFFICE VERY WEAK WITH NO SIGINIFICANT PIECE OF LEGISLATION PASSED, HUNDREDS OF FBI AGENTS WORKING FOR A SEX CASE IN WHICH THE AGENTS COULD HAVE BEEN WORKING ON SOME SERIOUS MATTERS, LET'S SAY FOR EXAMPLE "TERRORISM." SO, HOW DO YOU FEEL THAT YOUR BOGUS, AND SELFISH ARTICLES CONTRIBUTED TO THE ABOVE? David Brock: I think in the wake of September 11 the entire smear campaign against the Clintons, including my own role in it, looks that much worse. Republicans bear some culpability in all of this for their obsessive focus on scandal in the '90s, rather than important issues facing the country. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Charleston, SC : How would you respond to someone who believes that you are an opportunist who changed your political spots to further your career ambitions? David Brock: If this was about my career ambitions, there would have been no need to change political stripes. I had a very successful and lucrative career in the right wing that I gave up after much struggle to write a real biography of Hillary Clinton rather than a hatchet job. When I write about that period in the book, I would hope that my sincerity would come through. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment from David Brock: There's no possible advantage career-wise for me to be admitting these unattractive things about myself now. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abingdon, Virginia : Can't wait to read your book. As a gay man and a former Republican, I'm wondering how this experience might now have changed your political philosophy. Do you still think of yourself as a conservative? A Republican? David Brock: No. I registered to vote as an Independent in 2000, but I enthusiastically voted for Al Gore. Coming to accept my own identity as a gay man have had some influence on the second thoughts I've had about politics. I made a decision that being a gay conservative was inherently such a contradiction that I couldn't live that way anymore. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Washington, DC : Have you offered a personal apology to Anita Hill and others maligned unfairly by you? David Brock: Yes. I've written twice to Anita Hill (privately) expressing my regret over what I'd written about her, once in 1998, long before this book was conceived, and once again last summer when I finished it. I know it's impossible to take back what I've done, but I hope this book can help set straight the historical record. http://www.angelfire.com/mt/peaceresources/activism.html by W. David Jenkins III Well, well, well. I guess it's official now. After years of right wing pundits and other forms of silliness making fun of Hillary's claim of a "right wing conspiracy" we all finally find out what most of us already knew. Hillary and the rest of us were right. Oh, I know that the conservatives are practically wetting themselves over Bernard Goldberg's book (which shall remain nameless here). They're also wetting themselves over David Brock's book,"Blinded By the Right" as well. And they're tripping over themselves between the two books. Once again, their hypocrisy is getting in the way. See, in order for them to hail one book, they also have to hail the other. And that is causing them quite a bit of anguish. And their squirming dilemma is delicious! I haven't read the whole book yet. Actually, I've been having a bit of fun listening to the "call in" shows and watching Washington Journal and others. The wrath of the conservatives is unparalleled when it comes to Mr. Brock. The most intelligent argument against his book is "Well, if he said he was lying then, how do we know he's not lying now?" And that has become the new mantra for the right when asked about the book. That's the talking point. That's the best they could come up with. Can you say "desperation", boys and girls? Sure you can. I have to admit, I was surprised that the media gave this guy the time of day. Each time he was on, Mr. Brock held his own against the callers and whoever was interviewing him. He stated over and over, "I was wrong. I was lying. There really WAS a right wing conspiracy." Did you guys hear him? Wasn't it great? And then a week later the media comes out with the story that the Whitewater investigation was a $73 million dollar waste of money? The truth is out. The republicans are the real sore losers. They wasted eight plus years and millions of dollars….your dollars because they couldn't deal with the fact that the Reagan/Bush Era was the worst thing to ever happen to the later 20th century American people. Their corrupt and disgusting dream was over and they couldn't deal with it. So they spent their time and our money trying to paint Bill Clinton as the devil and they failed. In fact, they're still trying and they are still failing. Trust me, there is no way that Little Bush is gonna strut out of office in three years riding as high as Clinton did. The truth is leaking out. The week or so that Brock was allowed to appear was heaven. We heard him say it. The Republican Jihad was a reality. And it still is. These yahoos are still at it. And we all know what they're doing. Gale Norton is out there lying to Katie Curic about clean air standards. Trent Lott has waged war against the Democrats because they wouldn't let a racist on the federal bench. Mitch McConnell is gonna take campaign finance reform to court because he needs Chinese money to get re-elected 'cause Americans won't give him any. O'Reilly and Rush are going to continue to pump oral flatulence on the airwaves while George Will wonders if his words don't sound as stupid as his hair piece looks. Rumsfeld and Powell will continue to round 'em up and send 'em to countries that allow torture while Cheney continues to negotiate pipeline plans disguised as the "War on Terrorism" on his boss's son's behalf. Bush will continue to talk tough about not being afraid of "two bit terrorists" while hoping nobody notices that he's scared to death of the people he restricts to "First Amendment Zones." And then, there's always Tom DeLay who's always happy to go on Fox News Sunday to blame everything from terrorism to the moldy leftovers you have in the back of your refrigerator on Bill Clinton. But it's not going to work anymore. Why? Because we know they are hopeless pathetic liars. Everything they blamed on Clinton is really their fault. The crappy economy is their fault. Enron is their fault. The corporate monopoly on the media is their fault. 9/11 is their fault. If they hadn't been wasting valuable intelligence resources on Clinton's zipper or Condit's "relationship," maybe, just maybe we would've had a better handle on things. Rising gas prices are their fault. Lost jobs are their fault. Fox News is their fault. "Joanie Loves Chachi" and Bob Sagett are their fault. Global warming is their fault. The fact that social security will be gone when you and I retire is their fault. "Celebrity Boxing" and 'Survivor" is their fault. Letterman becoming unfunny and trivial is their fault. The death of true journalism is their fault. Brittany Spears is their fault. I was late for work the other day. That's their fault too. The eroding of our civil rights and right to privacy is their fault. My paper was late this morning and my bed isn't made. That's their fault too. In fact, everything that's wrong with everything is their fault. Okay, I know. I got a little carried away. But, damn that felt good! Thank you, David Brock. Thanks to you, now we can stop banging our heads against a cinder block. Well, at least until the next time Bush Jr. opens his yap again. The Smoke Machine By PAUL KRUGMAN n a way, it's a shame that so much of David Brock's "Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative" is about the private lives of our self-appointed moral guardians. Those tales will sell books, but they may obscure the important message: that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" is not an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality, and that it works a lot like a special-interest lobby. Modern political economy teaches us that small, well-organized groups often prevail over the broader public interest. The steel industry got the tariff it wanted, even though the losses to consumers will greatly exceed the gains of producers, because the typical steel consumer doesn't understand what's happening. "Blinded by the Right" shows that the same logic applies to non-economic issues. The scandal machine that employed Mr. Brock was, in effect, a special-interest group financed by a handful of wealthy fanatics — men like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose cultlike Unification Church owns The Washington Times, and Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled the scandal-mongering American Spectator and many other right-wing enterprises. It was effective because the typical news consumer didn't realize what was going on. The group's efforts managed to turn Whitewater — a $200,000 money-losing investment — into a byword for scandal, even though an eight-year, $73 million investigation never did find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons. Just imagine what the scandal machine could have done with more promising raw material — such as the decidedly unusual business transactions of the young George W. Bush. But there is, of course, no comparable scandal machine on the left. Why not? One answer is that for some reason there is a level of anger and hatred on the right that has at best a faint echo in the anti-globalization left, and none at all in mainstream liberalism. Indeed, the liberals I know generally seem unwilling to face up to the nastiness of contemporary politics. It's also true that in the nature of things, billionaires are more likely to be right-wing than left-wing fanatics. When billionaires do support more or less liberal causes, they usually try to help the world, not take over the U.S. political system. Not to put too fine a point on it: While George Soros was spending lavishly to promote democracy abroad, Mr. Scaife was spending lavishly to undermine it at home. And his achievement is impressive; key figures from the Scaife empire are now senior officials in the Bush administration. (And Mr. Moon's newspaper is now in effect the administration's house organ.) Clearly, scandalmongering works: the public and, less excusably, the legitimate media all too readily assume that where there's smoke there must be fire — when in reality it's just some angry rich guys who have bought themselves a smoke machine. And the media are still amazingly easy to sucker. Just look at the way the press fell for the fraudulent tale of vandalism by departing Clinton staffers, or the more recent spread of the bogus story that Ken Lay stayed at the Clinton White House. Regular readers of this column know that not long ago I found myself the target of a minor-league smear campaign. The pattern was typical: right-wing sources insisting that a normal business transaction (in my case consulting for Enron, back when I was a college professor, not an Op-Ed columnist, and in no position to do the company any favors) was somehow corrupt; then legitimate media picking up on the story, assuming that given all the fuss there must be something to the allegations; and no doubt a lingering impression, even though no favors were given or received, that the target must have done something wrong ("Isn't it hypocritical for him to criticize crony capitalism when he himself was on the take?"). Now that I've read Mr. Brock's book I understand what happened. Slate's Tim Noah, whom I normally agree with, says that Mr. Brock tells us nothing new: "We know . . . that an appallingly well-financed hard right was obsessed with smearing Clinton." But who are "we"? Most people don't know that — and anyway, he shouldn't speak in the past tense; an appallingly well-financed hard right is still in the business of smearing anyone who disagrees with its agenda, and too many journalists still allow themselves to be used. I found "Blinded by the Right" distasteful, but revelatory. So, I suspect, will many others.