In other words, in two short paragraphs Brock manages to misrepresent everything he reports about me, despite the fact that he knew from personal experience (which he suppressed) that his portrait was false, while facts that he may not have known at first hand, such as my actual activities in Hollywood, were readily available on the Web.

Brock, of course, cannot even present himself with any integrity that lasts for more than a sentence. He did not volunteer himself as a conservative gay icon, as he proposes in the paragraph above, but conceded his gayness only after he was threatened with outing by the left -- an episode he actually describes a few pages earlier but then ignores. In the same incoherent vein, he first portrays conservatives as callous homophobes and then barely a page later describes their reaction to his outing as one of universal support, without bothering to explain the contradiction.

Actually, he does attempt to explain it by the reference to me. The "real attitude of the conservative movement towards homosexuality," according to Brock, is what conservatives allegedly say behind his back: scorn and disgust that asserts itself in hurtful anti-gay slurs. Without self-aggrandizement I can say that this is a pivotal revelation in the book, because it is a revelation that ultimately propels Brock from one side of the political barricades to the other, or so he claims.

Yet the only accurate statement in Brock's account of my "slur" is that I didn't know for a time that my editor at the Free Press, Chad Conway, was gay. I can speak with certainty to the fact that the editor whom I allegedly hurt was Chad Conway (who is not a political conservative). First, because Chad is the only editor I know who is both gay and a "friend" of David Brock's. Second, because when Brock and I recently appeared on Warren Olney's NPR radio show and I confronted him with his lies about this conversation, he did not deny the fact that Chad was the alleged source of the anecdote in his book.

In order to check Chad's side of the story -- all this happened years ago -- I called him right before my appearance on the NPR show. Chad had not read Brock's book, and was unaware that it contained the anecdote in question. In other words, Brock chose to print a hateful, damaging story about me -- which contradicted everything he otherwise knew about me from my public and private behavior -- without even checking with his source to see if he had heard or remembered the incident correctly. And this is the new, reformed David Brock! When I read Chad the passage, he was as appalled by Brock's slander as I had been. Chad and I had discussed Brock many times over the years of our friendship, and Chad knew that my views of Brock and his political conversion were entirely free of anti-gay prejudice.

For the record, Chad said: "You have never made an anti-gay slur to me or about David Brock or anyone else; you have never said anything hurtful to me -- not about gays or anything else. I have always enjoyed our professional relationship and our friendship, and you have always been supportive of me."

When I confronted the bestselling defamer on the NPR show with this refutation of his claims, he was not the least apologetic or regretful for what he had done. He neither retracted his slander, nor attempted to defend it. He simply pretended that he had not been confronted with it, and moved on to the next page of his attack.

The perspective from which David Brock views the conservatives who inhabit his book is so relentlessly squalid it inevitably swallows the author himself. At one point, Brock finds himself facing the head of Simon & Schuster, whom he is fleecing for a million-dollar advance by making promises he knows he will not keep. He thinks to himself, "Is this smirking asshole me?" The answer, David, is yes.

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