IS HILLARY THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF THE
HOLOCAUST?
I'm sure you've read or heard about the latest attempt by the
reactionary shrieking heads to paint Hillary Clinton as the greatest
evil in the history of western civilization. The rumor making the
usual rounds of LPI (Looney Press International) is that in 1974
Hillary - then only a GFOB with the WOB role a year or so
away - called Bill's campaign manager a "fucking Jew bastard."
David Brock editorializes on the topic in today's
(7/20/00) NYTimes. That's David Brock
as in the author of
The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (1996).
Brock first achieved notoriety as the author of
The Real Anita Hill, a book that painted Clarence Thomas's
(you know, Scalia's law clerk)
accuser as someone just short of a psychotic crack whore.
It also shot him to the top of the GOP muckraker charts and got
him on the A-list for all the brandy and cigar parties, despite the
well known secret that Brock was one of "them."
He also had no trouble finding work after that, becoming an if not
the "investigative writer" for the American Spectator, the
official "respectable" house organ for Clinton bashing during the 90s (with the "respectable" basically meaning that - unlike the even
kookier magazines and web sites that churned out story after story
on the Adolf and Eva of the 90s - they edited the UFO references out
of their articles).
His book on Hillary was anticipated with voluminous drool by the
right back in 1996. He was expected to give her the full psychotic
crack whore treatment but, according the Brock, the book...
... was widely anticipated on the political right as the October
surprise that would swing the 1996 election to the Republicans.
Having whetted the appetites of the Clinton-hating audience with a
lurid article in The American Spectator about the president's
alleged past sexual infidelities, an article I now regret having
written, and working under the pressure of justifying a huge
advance, I struggled mightily with giving my readers what I
knew they wanted: Hillary Clinton in leg irons.
I couldn't do it. The facts weren't there, nor was I willing any longer
to use innuendo and unverified charges to spice up my material,
which I had done in the past.
After the book was published, I found myself picking up the pieces
of a broken career as a right-wing muckraker, but I was proud
of my book even though it had trouble in the marketplace.
The Clinton-hating cadre was furious at Brock over this act of
"betrayal." He detailed his slide from grace in a notorious article
he wrote for Esquire in July 1997 entitled "Confessions of
a Right-Wing Hit Man," some details of which can be found in
a
Salon article by David Futrelle.
Upon rereading the latter, one can see that Brock's apostasy from
what he calls the "neo-Stalinist thought police" of the conservative
movement wasn't as complete as it appears in today's editorial.
In his "Confessions" piece, he still defended his Spectator stories
as powerful and necessary exposes, while now he "regrets having
written" them.
Brock was axed by the Spectator in the fall of 1997 and, in the
Esquire story, tells about how after he no longer became useful
to them many of his "friends" on
the right started "remembering" that he was gay.
His employment with the Spectator had always seemed a bit
strange to me, what with it frequently engaging in gay-bashing along
with the rest of the reactionary kitbag of knee-jerk issues.
I see it as just another of those weird signs of the apocolypse
that popped up in the 80s, with another being the strange alliance
between a GOP that still harbored more than a few hood-wearing
good ol' boys and the conservative Jews of the "Commentary"
crowd. A (questionable given the source) pledge of eternal fealty to Israel apparently outweighed
the risks of cosying up to a pack of troglodytes on whose hate
pamphlets the liquid paper was still drying over the phrase
"Christ killers."
Be that as it may, let's get to Brock's comments concerning the
specifics of this most recent accusation against Hillary Clinton:
In researching my political biography of Mrs. Clinton in 1995, I
conducted several lengthy interviews with the sources of this
story, Paul and Mary Lee Fray. While they did describe in
colorful detail a shouting match between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Fray
in campaign headquarters, they never mentioned Mrs. Clinton's
alleged - and, one has to think, unforgettable - use of an
ugly anti-Semitic epithet against him. Apparently, in their
dealings with Jerry Oppenheimer, a former National Enquirer
reporter and author of the new book, the Frays' memory was
somehow enhanced.
Brock ends the editorial in a manner I can't hope to top so it'll
also serve as the end of this entry:
For eight years, Hillary Clinton has been portrayed (by me,
among countless others) as a bleeding-heart liberal.
Now, she's suddenly a bigot.
posted by Steven Baum
7/20/2000 10:25:56 AM |
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