12/05/2014 Talking Points Memo
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Speaking of male hysteria brings us to the case of Tyrrell’s protégé at the American Spectator, David Brock, and his biography, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. After receiving a million dollar book advance to write a smear job on Hillary similar to the one he’d previously performed on Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill (Brock was famously the author of the “a bit nutty and a bit slutty” line about Hill), a strange thing happened when he tried to plunge the dagger again. Somehow he couldn’t. Sure there was the stuff about the 60s radicalism that Hillary never really abandoned, including a catty analysis of her college wardrobe. And like the rest, he spends pages enumerating her bodily crimes and misdemeanors: given her thick legs she adopted the sort of “loose-fitting, flowing pants favored by the Viet Cong” (just call her Ho Chi Rodham); along with these, she sported white socks and sandals (here, even I must protest), wore no makeup, piled her hair on top of her head, and “came from the ‘look-like-shit school of feminism.’” Even once ensconced in the professional world she cut a “comic figure” with her hair fried into an Orphan Annie perm and a “huge eyebrow across her forehead that looked like a giant caterpillar.”
But more of the time it’s an intermittently compassionate portrait of a gawky, brainy, well-intentioned Midwestern girl swept off her feet by a charismatic Southern charmer, who migrated to the backwaters of Arkansas—or Dogpatch, as Brock likes to call it—to advance Bill’s political fortunes, sacrificing herself and her principles for love. Bill repaid her by having sex with everyone in sight. But Hillary wasn’t a phony, and shouldn’t have had to play the part to advance Bill’s career, Brock insists—he even says that her physical appearance should never have become a political issue, notwithstanding the amount of time he devotes to cataloguing it.
One of fascinating aspects of Brock’s employment situation was that he happens to be gay and the Spectator happens to regularly fulminate against gay rights, as did his yappy boss Tyrrell whenever given the chance. When Brock speculates that Hillary might have been “perversely drawn to the rejection implied by Bill’s philandering,” willing to accept compromises and humiliation in the sexual arena because of the greater good she and Bill could together accomplish, Brock—who’d once thrown a gala party to celebrate the hundredth day of Newt Gingrich’s anti-gay Contract With America—could have been describing his own career arc too. The big problem for him was that he ended up identifying with Hillary when he was supposed to be vilifying her. Some mysterious alchemy took place in the course of his writing this book: instead of exposing Hillary to the world, she exposed Brock to himself. The result was a stormy break-up with his pals on the Right: he became persona non grata in his former circles.
But he and Hillary had some sort of imaginary bond, at least in Brock’s imagination. He describes waiting in line for several hours at a bookstore for Hillary to sign his copy of It Takes a Village, and where he hoped to stage their first face-to-face meeting. The question on his mind, he confesses, is what she thinks of him. But when he reaches the head of the line, faces up to the real Hillary rather than the imaginary one, identifies himself and asks when he could have an interview, Hillary’s wry reply is, “Probably never.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ts/men-who-hate-hillary-clinton