Tag: Blinded By The Right

http://www.laweekly.com/2008-10-09/news/an-outing-in-mccain-camp-stays-in/

By David Ehrenstein Wednesday, Oct 8 2008
“If an outing happens in the forest and no one hears it, is it an outing?” wonders gay activist Mike Rogers. It’s a question that he and outing pioneer Michelangelo Signorile have been asking since September 22, when they outed Mark Buse, longtime Senate chief of staff to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. With the economy tanking, Sarah Palin on the attack, Lindsay Lohan “going lesbian” and Clay Aiken making the cover of People the day after the Buse revelation, you may not have heard about it. If you heard of Buse at all, it was likely for the $460,000 in lobbying fees he earned in 2003 and 2004 from troubled loan giant Freddie Mac (not to be confused with the more than $2 million McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, received over the years for work he and his lobbying firm did for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as recently as August). On political Web sites ranging from Daily Kos, Eschaton and Firedoglake all the way to the gay-centered Towleroad, JoeMyGod and Pam’s House Blend, Buse has been Topic A — especially afterSignorile provided on-the-record quotes from an ex-lover of Buse’s, Brian Davis. Rogers even went to Buse’s Washington office to personally deliver the latest Roy Cohn Award for most harm done to the gay community by a gay man.

“Did the gay readers of my blog go, ‘Oh, my God, I live in D.C. and I can’t believe he’s gay’” Rogers asks. “No. But One News Now, an online news service that’s about as right wing as you can get, was quite upset, and they’re hardly the only ones.”

Patrick Sammon, president of the gay conservative Log Cabin Republicans (which decried the outing as “the politics of personal destruction”), sees things differently: “You can’t out someone who has been openly gay for many, many years. This is silly.”

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1050304,00.html

Ann Coulter and I were well into a bottle of white Bordeaux–and I believe she was chewing her fourth piece of Nicorette–when it happened. From what little I knew of her–mainly her propensity for declamations such as “liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole”–I thought it impossible for Coulter to blush. Many of her fans would later tell me it was her fearlessness they admired, her fully unburdened sense of outrage against liberalism, against anyone left of Joseph McCarthy (whom Coulter flattered in her best-selling book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism).
But in person, Coulter is more likely to offer jokes than fury. For instance, you might ask her to name her historical antecedents in the conservative movement, and she’ll burst forth, “I’m Attila the Hun,” and then break into gales of laughter so forceful you smell the Nicorette. “Genghis Khan!”
So finally, I asked that she be serious. I wanted to see the rancor that allegedly is her sole contribution to public discourse (that and being a “lying liar,” in Al Franken’s estimation, as well as a “telebimbo” [Salon] and a “skank,” according to a blog kept by Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott). Why, I asked, did she enjoy attacking others and being attacked?
She composed herself and offered a very Ann Coulter answer. “They’re terrible people, liberals. They believe–this can really summarize it all–these are people who believe,” she said, now raising her voice, “you can deliver a baby entirely except for the head, puncture the skull, suck the brains out and pronounce that a constitutional right has just been exercised. That really says it all. You don’t want such people to like you!”

http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/1400047285.asp

Can David Brock be believed when he names names and kicks some serious booty in BLINDED BY THE RIGHT? Today Show host Matt Lauer posed the question in an interview when the book was first released in hardcover. Brock writes in a new preface to the paperback version of the New York Times bestseller that “as a leading conservative writer in the 1990s, I was confessing to having been complicit in a propagandistic campaign of lies against liberal targets — Anita Hill and the Clintons, among others. The question, of course, is one that all whistle blowers, publicly exposing nefarious activities in which they themselves were largely compromised, inevitably must confront.”

He says that the “once a liar, always a liar” question is nearly impossible to answer. He finally decided to throw himself on the mercy of the court: “People could choose to believe me and my account of ‘the vast right wing conspiracy,’ or they could choose not to.”

When Brock learned that galleys of the book were being faxed around Washington prior to its initial release, he waited anxiously for the right shoe to drop. It never did. While the book was favorably reviewed in the mainstream press, conservative news organs such as the New Republic, National Review, Washington Times and New York Post, as well as the Wall Street Journal, all surprisingly took a pass. Surprising, because specific reporters and editorialists from each of these papers are pretty thoroughly kicked in the shins throughout the book. Even more surprising was that no efforts surfaced to discredit anything he wrote of a personal nature about players in the media and in the political arena. And personal they are —blushingly so. He avers that he has not been sued or even, except in a “gotcha” on the date of a wedding, caught in an inaccuracy. In one case, a columnist at the New York Daily News called to say that Matt Drudge, author of a well-known online newsletter, had denied Brock’s allegation that he had hit on him in Los Angeles, following up with a sexually suggestive email. When Brock faxed a copy of the offending email to the Daily News columnist, he heard nothing more.

The New York Times   3/24/2002   By Frank Bruni

BLINDED BY THE RIGHT

The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.

Few journalists, if that is the right word for him, brimmed with the kind of bile that David Brock did. He was a serial assassin of character, an unhappy man on a cruel mission: to tar the identified enemies of conservatives by whatever half-truths or hyperbolic accusations might be necessary. He was ruthlessly good at it, even poetic in a perverse fashion. It is to Brock that we owe the printed assertion that Anita Hill returned students’ exams with pubic hair on the pages, and it is to Brock that we owe the infamous line that Hill was ”a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”

Now he is taking all of it — or at least most of it — back. ”Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative” is less a memoir than a supposedly anguished mea culpa, a public act of political atonement. Brock wants us to know that he did people wrong, and that he recognizes it. He wants us to understand that he was chasing fame and fleeing personal demons, and that the velocity of those efforts distracted him from the unwarranted damage he caused. And he wants us to believe him.

But can we? That is the abiding frustration and ultimate limitation of ”Blinded by the Right,” which encompasses the ugly political warfare of the 1990’s, from the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas through the impeachment of President Clinton. Brock unavoidably taints his testimonial with his admission of a past willingness to twist facts and a habitual tendency to see the world in black and white. So while he has switched tribes, decamping from the right to find a new appreciation for the left, it is impossible to know whether he has switched tactics. Brock seems as exercised by the mendacity of conservatives as he once was by the machinations of liberals, and as eager to settle scores. His critique of his former allies is withering. The credibility of that critique is anyone’s guess.

Certainly, some of Brock’s book is trustworthy, because he simply adds abundant detail to what other, less suspect journalists have also chronicled: the millions of dollars that Richard Mellon Scaife poured into indiscriminate efforts to bring down Bill and Hillary Clinton; the hypocrisy of conservatives who espouse traditional moral values despite personal histories including abortions and extramarital affairs; the smear campaigns that were driven as much by a lust for power as by principle. Brock, who was once deep inside the conservative movement, is in a position to convey all of this, even if he is not the most reliable messenger.

As he tells it, he lurched to the right during his student days at the University of California, Berkeley, where he encountered the left’s sometimes oppressive political correctness. His new political affiliation was cemented by his desire to be accepted by a tightly bound circle, which was what he found when he went to Washington and began to mingle with conservatives there. Failing to grasp that their bellicose certainty was simply a mirror image of what he despised among liberals, Brock relished and embraced it, a decision he attributes partly — and in a manner that is perhaps too pat — to his homosexuality.

”After all, I was in the closet, alienated from myself, and I was also a social misfit,” Brock writes, adding, ”The apocalyptic ‘us versus them’ paradigm was gratifying, for it held out the promise of assuaging my insecurities and giving me a sense of finally belonging.”

His first big show of fidelity came with his decision to savage Anita Hill in the pages of The American Spectator, the magazine for which he wrote, even though he says he reflexively believed her testimony about Thomas’s sexually inappropriate office behavior. ”I took a scattershot approach,” he writes, ”dumping virtually every derogatory — and often contradictory — allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix.” A muckraking article in 1992 led to a best-selling book, ”The Real Anita Hill,” and to a determination to maintain his newfound celebrity at the expense of a next target. So Brock absorbed and circulated patently suspicious stories from Arkansas state troopers about Bill Clinton’s sexual shenanigans during the time when he was the governor of that state.

Looking back on it now, Brock berates himself and ridicules the prominent conservatives who shared his zeal, drawing on a smorgasbord of firsthand experience to ladle out tasty tidbits about Arianna Huffington, Laura Ingraham, Kenneth Starr and Ted Olson, now the solicitor general in the Bush administration. Brock says that while Olson did not doubt that Vincent Foster, a Clinton aide, had committed suicide, he nonetheless encouraged conjecture that Foster might have been murdered. For committed Clinton bashers, Brock explains, this was an effective strategy for ”turning up the heat on the administration until another scandal was shaken loose.”

Why did Brock break ranks? He says the process began with the publication of a later book about Hill and Thomas, ”Strange Justice,” by Jane Mayer, who now writes for The New Yorker, and Jill Abramson, now the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times. ”Strange Justice” debunked much of ”The Real Anita Hill,” and Brock discovered that he could not honestly and successfully debunk ”Strange Justice” in return. Thus began a re-examination of his methods and a readjustment of his moral compass, culminating in a vote for Al Gore in November 2000.

That, at least, is Brock’s own take on his arc, which ends with a man awakening at long last to the concept of integrity. A less charitable interpretation might be that Brock wanted a new act, and found it in self-flagellation. For a photograph that accompanied a 1997 article in Esquire in which he first began to confess his right-wing sins, he let himself be tied to a tree and surrounded by kindling, the pose of a heretic on the precipice of immolation. He subsequently wrote yet another confessional for Esquire. ”Blinded by the Right” is only his latest stab at a rather theatrical brand of contrition.

THE book is consistently articulate and very funny from time to time. It undeniably holds the reader’s interest. But it is also disconcerting in unintended ways. Brock brings a strange boastfulness even to passages in which he is supposedly raking himself over the coals, and he litters the book with derogatory comments about other men’s appearances that have ambiguous relevance to the narrative at hand. He variously describes the characters he meets as ”chubby, spectacled,” ”bald, cherub-faced,” ”fat, pockmarked,” ”roly-poly,” ”plump,” ”white-haired, red-faced,” ”sweaty, corpulent” and ”misshapen, unkempt and seemingly unshowered.” He also lets it be known that he did not lack for amorous attention, and that he began working out with weights as he put his postconservative life together.

For all of that, ”Blinded by the Right” is valuable in its vivid depiction of a take-no-prisoners era — perhaps in retreat, perhaps merely in quiescence — when genuine political debate took a back seat to playground bullying and much of journalism, not just Brock’s, descended to a gossipy and lascivious low. Brock flourished in that muddy gutter, which is why it clings to him still.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/24/books/sorry-about-that.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/arts/television/16ambush.html

When Bill O’Reilly’s camera crew ambushed Mike Hoyt at a bus stop in Teaneck, N.J., a few months ago, the on-camera confrontation and the microphone in his face reminded him, oddly enough, of the “60 Minutes” interviewer Mike Wallace.

Mr. Hoyt, executive editor of The Columbia Journalism Review, was well-versed in the venerable art of the on-camera, on-the-street confrontation, perfected by Mr. Wallace and other hard-charging television journalists in decades past. Now, in an appropriation of Mr. Wallace’s techniques, ambush interviews have become a distinguishing feature of Mr. O’Reilly’s program on the Fox News Channel.

Mr. Hoyt, one of more than 50 people that Mr. O’Reilly’s young producers have confronted in the past three years, said the interviews were “really just an attempt to make you look bad.” In almost every case Mr. O’Reilly uses the aggressive interviews to campaign for his point of view.

Mr. O’Reilly, the right-leaning commentator who has had the highest-rated cable show for about eight years, has called the interviews a way to hold people accountable for their actions. “When the bad guys won’t comment, when they run and hide, we will find them,” he said on “The O’Reilly Factor” recently.

http://www.nationalreview.com/media-blog/33785/david-brock-sitting-2008-out/greg-pollowitz
Progressive Media USA, the group organized to be the main soft-money advertising vehicle for Democrats in the fall, will dramatically scale back its efforts in deference to the wishes of the party’s presumptive nominee.

“Progressive Media will not be running an independent ad campaign this year,” David Brock, the head of the organization, confirmed in a statement obtained by The Fix this morning.

“Progressive Media was established to be an independent on-going progressive issue advocacy organization,” Brock added. “We were not established for one issue, one candidate or one election cycle. But donors and potential donors are getting clear signals from the Obama camp through the news media and we recognize that reality.”

Those familiar with the group’s decision cast it as largely the result of the stated desire of Sen. Barack Obama‘s campaign to not direct funds to outside organizations in hopes of better controlling the Democratic message in the fall. (Note: Ben Smith of Politico first reported this story.) But the group was also struggling to raise the money necessary to be a major force in the presidential race and was riven by internal divisions.

During a gathering of Obama’s national finance committee earlier this month in Indianapolis, it was made clear to these top donors that they should concentrate on raising money for the candidate and not spend their time funding independent organizations of which Progressive Media USA is one.

By ASHLEY PARKER
Published: October 22, 2010

WASHINGTON — Lillian McEwen is not one of the women whose name is generally associated with Justice Clarence Thomas and his contentious confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court seat.

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But now, at age 65 and retired from a long legal career, with nothing to lose and a book to sell, Ms. McEwen is ready for that to change.

This week’s news that his wife, Virginia, had left voice mail for Anita Hill, asking her to apologize for “what you did with my husband” at the confirmation hearings, gave Ms. McEwen an unexpected opportunity to talk about Justice Thomas, the man she was romantically involved with for “six or seven years” in the 1980s. The phone call, she said in an interview Friday, makes sense to her.

For Ms. Thomas, she said, the accusation of sexual harassment made by Ms. Hill “still has to be a mystery, that he is still angry about this and upset about it after all these years, and I can understand that she would want to know why, and solve a problem if she could — I mean, acting as a loyal wife.”

But Ms. McEwen said she knew a different Clarence Thomas, one whom she recognized in the 1991 testimony of Ms. Hill, who claimed that he had repeatedly made inappropriate sexual comments to her at work, including descriptions of pornographic films.

Ms. McEwen said that pornography for Justice Thomas was “just a part of his personality structure.” She said he kept a stack of pornographic magazines, “frequented a store on Dupont Circle that catered to his needs,” and allowed his interest in pornography to bleed into his professional relationships.

“It starts inside,” she said, tapping her head during a 30-minute interview inside her three-story condominium in Southwest Washington. “And then your behavior flows from what it is that’s important to you. That’s what happened with him, certainly.”

Justice Thomas, through a Supreme Court spokeswoman, Kathy Arberg, declined to comment.

Ms. McEwen, who said she was surprised not to be subpoenaed by either side, did not testify about Justice Thomas at his confirmation hearings. She said she never received a response from a note she wrote to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was running the hearings and with whom she had worked as a lawyer for the Judiciary Committee. She said the note, sent after Justice Thomas was nominated, reminded Mr. Biden that she knew the nominee.

“The hearings themselves were so constrained — the questioning, the subject matter — the scope of the hearings didn’t really allow for any kind of treatment of the issues that had been raised,” she said. “The kind of Clarence I knew at the time that these events occurred is the kind of Clarence that did not emerge from the hearings, I’ll say that. It was not him, and he probably would not have been on the court if the real Clarence had actually been revealed.”

But now Ms. McEwen, who first spoke to The Washington Post for an article published Friday, is ready to talk about the man she says is the “real Clarence,” or at least the one she knew intimately. After retiring in 2007, Ms. McEwen began working on a memoir, which she completed this year. Ms. McEwen also spoke with ABC News.

The book, tentatively called “All About Me,” focuses on her childhood in the District, but she said Justice Thomas appears “in probably about 20 to 25 percent of the pages in the book, because he was a significant part of my life for many years.”

However, what may be the biggest scoop in her book — the private details of her contact with Justice Thomas — may also prove the biggest challenge in getting it published. She said that some agents have not gotten back to her, and others have said “it’s just not the kind of book that they are particularly enthusiastic about, a lot of it having to do with the fact that Clarence is included.”

Though Ms. McEwen still seems to get upset discussing Justice Thomas at times, she said she was the one who ended the relationship.

“He was changing and I didn’t like it,” she said. “He was just becoming obsessed with campaigning for the president and interviewing with reporters and raising his child in a way I didn’t like. It’s a combination of obsessed, ambitious, irritable and bullying that was just too much for me.”

Ms. McEwen has generally kept a low profile all these years, largely out of respect for the wishes of Justice Thomas, who asked her to “take the same position toward him that his first wife had taken” and not speak publicly about their relationship. They see each other “sporadically” — the last time they crossed paths, she said, was at a talk he gave at Howard University after his book, “My Grandfather’s Son,” came out in 2007.

“His book had a sense of anger about that whole process, that led me to believe he still carries a grudge, as if he had been victimized somehow, and as if he hadn’t won,” she said. “It was almost as if he were not on the Supreme Court. Like he was kept from it.”

As for Ms. McEwen’s book, she said the process of writing it was therapeutic. She recently showed it to her daughter.

“It was probably T.M.I.,” she said, using the abbreviation for “too much information.” “But that’s the way it is.”

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 23, 2010

WASHINGTON

In the wacky coda to one of the most searing chapters in American history, everyone remained true to form. Anita Hill reacted with starchy disgust. Ginni Thomas came across like a spiritually addled nut. Clarence Thomas was mute, no doubt privately raging about the trouble women have caused him. And now into the circus comes Lillian McEwen, an old girlfriend of Thomas’s.

Looking to shop a memoir, the 65-year-old McEwen used the occasion of Ginni’s weird phone message to Anita — asking her to “consider an apology” and “pray about this” and “O.K., have a good day!” — to open up to reporters.

If “the real Clarence” had been revealed at the time, he probably wouldn’t have ascended to the court, McEwen told The Times’s Ashley Parker. Especially since the real Clarence denied ever using the “grotesque” argot of the porn movies he regularly rented at a D.C. video store.

In her interviews, McEwen confirmed Thomas’s obsession with women with “huge, huge breasts,” with scouting the women he worked with as possible partners, and with talking about porn at work — while he was head of the federal agency that polices sexual harassment.

Years later, some of the Democrats on that all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee told me they assumed there must have been a consensual romance between the boss and his subordinate. McEwen assumed so, too, because Clarence took Anita with him when he changed agencies. Hill has made it clear she felt no reciprocal attraction.

Joe Biden, the senator who ran those hearings, was leery of the liberal groups eager to use Hill as a pawn to checkmate Thomas. He circumscribed the testimony of women who could have corroborated Hill’s unappetizing portrait of a power-abusing predator.

For the written record, Biden allowed negative accounts only from women who had worked with Thomas. He also ruled out testimony from women who simply had personal relationships with Thomas, and did not respond to a note from McEwen — a former assistant U.S. attorney who had once worked as a counsel for Biden’s committee — reminding him of her long relationship with Thomas.

It’s too late to relitigate the shameful Thomas-Hill hearings. We’re stuck with a justice-for-life who lied his way onto the bench with the help of bullying Republicans and cowed Democrats.

We don’t know why Ginni Thomas, who was once in the thrall of a cultish self-help group called Lifespring, made that odd call to Hill at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. But we do know that the Thomases show supremely bad judgment. Mrs. Thomas, a queen of the Tea Party, is the founder of a new nonprofit group, Liberty Central, which she boasts will be bigger than the Tea Party. She sports and sells those foam Statue of Liberty-style crowns as she makes her case against the “tyranny” of President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who, she charges, are hurting the “core founding principles” of America.

As The Times’s Jackie Calmes wrote, Mrs. Thomas started her nonprofit in late 2009 with two gifts of $500,000 and $50,000, and additional sums this year that we don’t know about yet. She does not have to disclose the donors, whose money makes possible the compensation she brings into the Thomas household.

There is no way to tell if her donors have cases before the Supreme Court or whether her husband knows their identities. And she never would have to disclose them if her husband had his way.

The 5-to-4 Citizens United decision last January gave corporations, foreign contributors, unions, Big Energy, Big Oil and superrich conservatives a green light to surreptitiously funnel in as much money as they want, whenever they want to elect or unelect candidates. As if that weren’t enough to breed corruption, Thomas was the only justice — in a rare case of detaching his hip from Antonin Scalia’s — to write a separate opinion calling for an end to donor disclosures.

In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court chose the Republican president. In Citizens United, the court may return Republicans to control of Congress. So much for conservatives’ professed disdain of judicial activism. And so much for the public’s long-held trust in the impartiality of the nation’s highest court.

Justice Stephen Breyer recently rejected the image of the high court as “nine junior varsity politicians.” But it’s even worse than that. The court has gone beyond mere politicization. Its liberals are moderate and reasonable, while the conservatives are dug in, guzzling Tea.

Thomas and Scalia have flouted ethics rules by attending seminars sponsored by Koch Industries, an energy and manufacturing conglomerate run by billionaire brothers that has donated more than $100 million to far-right causes.

Christine O’Donnell may not believe in the separation of church and state, but the Supreme Court does not believe in the separation of powers.

O.K., have a good day!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/us/politics/20thomas.html?_r=1&emc=na

WASHINGTON — Nearly 20 years after Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Justice Thomas’s wife has called Ms. Hill, seeking an apology.

In a voice mail left at 7:31 a.m. on Oct. 9 — the Saturday of Columbus Day weekend — Virginia Thomas asked her husband’s former aide-turned-adversary to make amends. Ms. Hill played the recording, from her voice mail at Brandeis University, for The Times.

“Good morning Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas,” it said. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometimes and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”

Ms. Thomas went on: “So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.”