Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
David Brock's exposé of the Republican attack machine shows that Democrats have to get serious about fighting back. And that doesn't mean Al Gore's Florida-style fisticuffs.
Apr 17, 2002 | In March 1998, two months after the Monica Lewinsky maelstrom had begun convulsing the political and media establishments, I was invited along with two other Salon editors and our Washington reporter to attend an afternoon reception at the White House. The gathering consisted mainly of a group of young White House fellows; I think the Salon contingent was invited out of curiosity about this maverick West Coast Web site that had begun breaking stories on the Whitewater investigation and its ties to the secretive anti-Clinton operation known as the Arkansas Project. The idle chit-chat in the room where FDR had delivered his fireside chats suddenly paused as Hillary Clinton breezed in, followed shortly after by her husband and his entourage. The president worked his way through the room and when he got to us, he immediately began discussing Salon's allegations that Ken Starr's chief Whitewater witness, crooked Arkansas judge David Hale, had received cash payments and legal assistance from the Clinton-haters who financed and ran the Arkansas Project. Clinton, quite understandably, wanted to know, "When is the rest of the press going to pick up on this stuff?"
After Clinton moved on, I drifted over to a knot of people gathered around the first lady. Several weeks before, she had elicited scorn and derision from the media with her comments about a "vast right-wing conspiracy" arrayed against her husband. Her small audience that day, however, was more sympathetic. After all, Salon was in the process of documenting the conspiracy, which if not "vast" was certainly extensive -- stretching literally from the swamps of Arkansas to the top of the GOP -- well-coordinated and financed, and relentless in pursuit of its prey. She talked with feeling about how difficult it was to withstand the intense political and media pressures, which had reached a frenzied level. And then she told us something that I don't believe she had said in public before, or has since: "When we were getting ready to announce for the 1992 campaign, the Bush people said to us, 'Don't run this time -- wait four years and you'll have a free pass. If you do run, we'll destroy you.' And I said to Bill, 'What are they talking about -- how could they do that?' And now we're finding out."
The Washington commentariat would have had another field day with these remarks -- they would have cited the story as one more example of Hillary's inclination toward political melodrama and exaggeration. But even though I didn't get the chance to ask her more questions, I believed the story and still do. It came back to me as I was reading David Brock's stunning new memoir of his days as a right-wing character assassin, "Blinded by the Right." There has been a dark and ruthless side to modern Republican politics ever since the Roosevelts were reviled as Jews and black-lovers and Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon worked their poisonous craft. But in the last decade, as Brock documents in often repulsive detail, this virulent conservatism -- which one of its more cunning practitioners, Lee Atwater, famously referred to as "extra-chromosome" Republicanism when even he grew exasperated with it -- has taken full control of the party.
Confronted with these relentless opponents, the Democrats have all too often caved in. When Al Gore blasted Bush last week, it was a painful reminder of what he and Joe Lieberman didn't do in Florida, when GOP bullies simply ripped the presidency out of their hands. Until the Democrats learn to fight for what they believe in as tenaciously as their opponents, they will never be an effective political force.
Brock paints a baroque portrait of the conservative movement and its GOP Jacobins, including the paranoid and reclusive billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who, through generous disbursements of his fortune (including to the American Spectator magazine's Arkansas Project), was able to make his hatreds and delusions those of the party; the movement's roly-poly Lenin, Newt Gingrich, who when not inveighing against the moral rot of 1960s demon seeds like Bill Clinton was pursuing the illicit delights offered by a young congressional aide; Ted Olson, the distinguished barrister and current Solicitor General who was not above penning anonymous smears of Clinton, soiling himself in the funky loam of the Arkansas Project and whose late wife, Barbara, once led a bizarre raiding party that, in search of more White House "Travelgate" dirt (remember that gravely important issue the GOP and Washington media so dutifully rubbed in the Republic's face?), trespassed onto the gated grounds of a private Georgetown compound to peep through the windows of a White House aide; the esteemed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who in his never-ending campaign to discredit Anita Hill and her supporters, leaked to Brock embarrassing personal information about a former female colleague that had been sealed in divorce court documents; C. Boyden Gray, the former Bush White House counsel whose attempt to pull off an "October surprise" against Clinton in 1992 would help spark the serpentine Whitewater investigation and who in graceful defeat kept urging Brock to pursue Vincent Foster murder tales and other gothic Clinton lore.
And these were the high-profile guys! The bit players in the conservative revolution, as described by Brock, were an even seamier lot. Lonely, fat, horny lawyers who brooded bitterly over Clinton's easy way with women; sleaze-peddling Arkansas troopers out to make a dirty buck; upright, gay-bashing conservatives who tried to bed Brock -- and then there's filthy-minded Lucianne Goldberg, who secured her footnote in American political history as Linda Tripp's accomplice, delightedly hawking a story to the equally spiteful New York Press about Clinton "finger-fucking" his daughter Chelsea.
There was simply nothing that these people were incapable of saying or doing to advance their political agenda. They shamelessly and self-righteously crossed dozens of lines that marked what once were the acceptable bounds of political battle. Everything was permissible, the Leninist Gingrich told them, because this was a war to the finish. The Clinton presidency was illegitimate, "a cultural coup d'état," they informed the country -- this from the same people who denounced Democrats for not "moving on" after George W. Bush was handed the presidential election by a stacked Supreme Court.
Brock's book, which must rank as the most sickening -- and entertaining -- exploration of the underside of American politics ever written, has rocketed up the bestseller lists. But the book has, for the most part, prompted an eloquent silence from Brock's former allies in the conservative propaganda wars -- Clarence Thomas, Ted Olson, Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, John Fund and so on. Some conservatives have tried to airily dismiss the book as the work of an unreliable observer -- "He says he lied about Anita Hill and Troopergate, how can we believe him now?" is the standard line. (To be fair, Salon's Kerry Lauerman asked the same question. ) Of course, Brock was lying on behalf of the conservative cause back then -- and despite how quickly the media dismantled much of his American Spectator reporting (and how some right-wing colleagues personally knew Brock's anti-Clinton charges were at the very least shaky), none of these conservatives questioned his veracity in those days. It's only now, with "Blinded by the Right," that conservatives have grown a sense of journalistic skepticism when it comes to Brock.
The fact is, none of Brock's most damning allegations in "Blinded by the Right" have been knocked down by the media or his conservative critics. In a letter to the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, Brock's old boss at the American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, attempted to salvage the shredded Troopergate story as well as defend Ted Olson against the Brock charge that he "encouraged conjecture that [Clinton counsel Vincent] Foster might have been murdered." But since Tyrrell, a clownish self-promoter and Clinton conspiracy freak whose own attempts at journalism never even reached Brock's old standards, is the conveyor of this rebuttal, it's safe to dismiss it as self-serving twaddle. With the exception of David Horowitz, who strongly denies Brock's claim that he made homophobic comments to a book editor he did not know was gay, no one has plausibly challenged even Brock's minor charges.
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