Author: Brian

http://articles.cnn.com/2009-02-23/entertainment/bollywood.hollywood_1_indian-cinema-french-new-wave-cinema-mumbai-based?_s=PM:SHOWBIZ

“Slumdog Millionaire” took home eight Oscars on Sunday night, a surprising achievement for a film once thought to be straight-to-DVD fodder.

The colorful story, which mixes the gritty life of Mumbai’s poor with the shiny aspirations of the new India, features no stars recognizable to Western audiences, but it may have made one of its native country.

So, is it time for Bollywood — as India’s huge Mumbai-based film industry is called — to come to America?

“International cinema comes in cycles in the United States,” said Frank Lovece, a film critic with Film Journal International. “Now, it’s Bollywood’s time.”

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/indira-varma-star-abcs-box-80255

British actress Indira Varma has landed the starring role in the ABC drama project, from writer Richard E. Robbins and executive producer Shonda Rhimes.
Meanwhile, Gina Torres has joined CBS’ drama pilot “Washington Field,” and David Giuntoli has joined CBS’ U.S. Attorney drama pilot.
“Box” is set at a Washington network news bureau and revolves around Catherine (Varma), an ambitious news producer, and her colleagues, who pursue the story at all costs, juggling personal animosities and crises of conscience along with the daily deadlines of a nightly news show.
Catherine is fast-talking, whip-smart and wound a little too tight for her own good. She runs the news bureau and thinks she finally is getting a promotion, but she is passed over.
Mark Tinker is directing the pilot, which is being executive produced by Robbins, Rhimes and Betsy Beers.
Varma is best known for her role as Niobe on the HBO/BBC drama series “Rome.”
The actress, who also co-starred on the CBS miniseries “Comanche Moon,” is repped by Affirmative and U.K.’s Gordon and French.
“Washington Field,” from CBS Par, revolves around an FBI squad made up of experts who travel the world responding to crises that concern U.S. national interests. Torres (“Don’t Let Me Drown”) will play the rapid-deployment team coordinator and tactical pilot. She is with Domain and Framework.

David Brock, the reformed conservative noise-maker, on how the Right has sabotaged journalism, democracy, and truth.

Mother Jones   9/1/2004   By Bradford Plumer

As a young journalist in the 1990s, David Brock was a key cog the Republican noise machine. Writing for the American Spectator, a conservative magazine funded by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, Brock gained fame for his attack pieces on Anita Hill and President Bill Clinton. Then, in 2002, Brock came clean. In his memoir, Blinded by the Right, Brock admitted that his work was based on lies and distortion, and part of a coordinated smear campaign funded by wealthy right wing groups to discredit Clinton and confuse the public.

Since then, Brock has continued to expose the conservative media onslaught. In his newest book, The Republican Noise Machine, Brock documents how right-wing groups pressure the media and spread misinformation to the public. It’s easy to see how this is done. Fringe conspiracies and stories will be kept alive by outlets like Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, and the Drudge Report, until they finally break into the mainstream media. Well-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation overwhelm news reporters with distorted statistics and conservative spin. Mainstream cable news channels employ staunchly rightwing pundits — like Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity — to twist facts and echo Republican talking points, all under the rubric of “balance.” Meanwhile, media groups like Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center have spent 30 years convincing the public that the media is, in fact, liberal. As Brock says, it’s all a sham: “I have seen, and I know firsthand, indeed from my own pen, how the organized Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also democracy and truth.”

Not content to merely complain, Brock launched Media Matters for America in May, a media watchdog organization devoted to exposing rightwing distortions in the news, and to chart undue conservative influence in the media.

Brock recently chatted with MotherJones.com about Media Matters, Swift Boat Vets, convention coverage, and the conservative stranglehold on the media.

MotherJones.com: What’s your impression of the campaign coverage so far?

David Brock: I’ve been interested in watching the level of conservative misinformation that circulates through the media. Now before Media Matters launched, I talked for quite some time in my book about the last election, where certain messages and themes would start in the Republican Party and then get into the media. The Republicans knew they couldn’t win on the issues in 2000, so they developed an explicit strategy to attack Gore’s character — and that ultimately seemed to have worked. If you looked at the exit polls from 2000 you see that on all the issues — even on taxes — voters preferred Gore and his policies, but the election was lost on the issues of trust and integrity. So it has always been my working theory that the same thing would happen this year, no matter who the candidate was.

MJ.com: So when did the “Republican noise machine” start attacking John Kerry?

DB: Well, it seemed to me that, in the first few months leading up to the Democratic National Convention, the conservative attack machine was very busy trying to shore up President Bush and hadn’t really turned its guns on John Kerry. Then during the spring, after it was clear that Kerry would be the nominee, I think they were still throwing various things at him and kind of hoping that something would stick and didn’t really find anything.

MJ.com: And with the Swift Boat story, they’ve finally found something.

DB: Right. I think the dynamic that has unfolded for the last three weeks is one that is very familiar to me, resembling the worst of the anti-Clinton activities that I was involved in. Back then, we were able to create a so-called story that had a lot of political motivation behind it, had partisan money behind it, and we were able to take that and get a lot of attention for it in explicitly conservative media — on radio talk shows, on internet sites like the Drudge Report. Eventually the story would spill over into the regular media.

I think the exact same thing has happened in the last three weeks, whereby a supposedly outside group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had been working as early as the spring, through a rather small ad buy and book published by Regnery –a publisher, note, that has the worst record in terms of putting out books filled with falsehoods. Then the group was able to get a lot of free media time for it — first starting on the internet and radio, then moving to cable shows like Fox, and finally getting into the New York Times and NBC News. And so you have something that has very little basis in fact spreading like a virus, and it’s creating doubt about Kerry’s character that didn’t seem to be there in the polls until very recently.

MJ.com: Now to me, it seems like some of the newspapers — the New York Times, the Washington Post — have actually been dissecting some of these claims. Does it seem like the mainstream media is no longer willing to follow conservative talking points quite so blindly?

DB: Well more so in this case than in the case of Gore, when there were either quotes made up and put in his mouth that he never said or quotes taken out of context like his Internet remarks. And it’s nothing like the coverage in the mainstream media of Whitewater. So it does seem in this case that the regular media has been trying to play the role of adjudicator of fact. Unfortunately, that didn’t really come about until the Swift Boat Vets had the conservative media echo chamber to themselves for about 10 days.

So when the newspapers finally got around to it, they found that by and large the charges don’t check out. But it seems like a losing battle in the sense that there’s so much noise about all this. You get to a point where the factual adjudication doesn’t matter because there are all these other outlets that are far less responsible, all talking about the ad, some of which have a political reason for promoting it.

MJ.com: So it’s no longer about who’s right, but who can scream the loudest?

DB: Sure. You can’t fault some of the reporting in the major papers. But there are so many sources and information, particularly with the internet, that stories like the Swift Boat ads take on a life of their own. The New York Times has much less authority nowadays when they say we don’t find the charges valid. So that’s the effect of what the conservatives have built up in terms of their ability to communicate a message that they want out there.

Part of it comes from this phony notion of balance — that we need to hear all sides of a story, and that everyone’s entitled to express their opinion. Conservatives have tried to write all this off by saying who can be against their right to say what they want to say? Of course, nobody’s against their right to say they don’t think John Kerry would be fit to command. But to make specific allegations and then have no records to back them up is a significant problem. And the viewer and casual radio listener may not be reading the 7000-word dissection in the Washington Post. So you’ve got two medias going on. And I know from my involvement in the anti-Clinton stuff that often the goal is just to confuse people, and to take the political opponent off his or her game, and to not let them talk about what they want to talk about. All those things seemed to have been achieved here. Even if at the end of the day the whole thing is viewed as a hoax, by the time we get there, the election may be over.

MJ.com: Turning to the Republican convention, what will Media Matters be paying attention to?

DB: We’re tracking TV coverage, for one. We did a study of cable coverage of the Democratic Convention and found that CNN and MSNBC made close to the same decisions about how much time they would devote to the speeches, while Fox decided to hold less live coverage. We’re eager to see whether Fox will allot the same time for Republicans, or whether they decide to devote more time because of the ideological composition of their audience.

MJ.com: I noticed Media Matters was wondering whether CNN would have a Democratic operative to speak on TV after each Republican speaker.

DB: Right, during the Democratic Convention, after Senator Edwards spoke, they switched to Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. And right after John Kerry spoke, they went to Ed Gillespie, [chairman of the Republican National Committee]. So we’re looking to see whether CNN will give time to Terry McAuliffe or another Democratic operative to come on and rebut Bush after he speaks.

MJ.com: Do you think that the Kerry campaign might not be as adept at using the media to its advantage?

DB: I do think you have to hand it to the Republicans in terms of their ability to work the media and to get the media to do what they want it to do. That ranges from having a more disciplined delivery system to actually voicing complaints about the media. As you may have noticed, former president Bush was bashing the New York Times in an interview on Monday, and Rudy Giuliani disparaged the media in his speech.

The Democrats seem to shy away from taking on the media in that way. If the Republicans were in Kerry’s position, facing a smear ad being given free airtime and uncritical coverage, they would be kicking and screaming about holding the media accountable. That doesn’t go on with the Democrats, I think partly because they have subconsciously accepted this critique that the media’s liberal. So maybe they feel that they’re going to get a fair shake. But in reality, there are a lot of biases in the media that trump whatever ideology reporters may hold. In the Swift Boat Case, the media is biased towards airing a dramatic story — and in this case, you’ve got a bunch of angry veterans, some dramatic accusations. It makes for good TV.

MJ.com: In addition to the Republican party, you’ve talked about a lot of well-financed conservative groups — think-tanks, media advocacy firms — that can influence media coverage. What role are they going to play in this election?

DB: Well, the conservative Media Research Center is planning to spend $2.8 million in an advertising campaign before the election, basically to attack the so-called liberal media. Their goal is to bully and intimidate the media, and it’s been very effective, because in a lot of newsrooms there’s concern shading into fear of being seen as liberal, and these reporters end up accommodating conservatism. It was particularly noticeable after 9/11 when the Media Research Center had a direct mail campaign promising to target network anchors and producers who were deemed insufficiently supportive of Bush’s aims in the war on terror. Those kinds of activities do end up coloring the coverage, and partly explains why questions about the war in Iraq weren’t asked at the time. There was a symposium of network anchors at Harvard back in July, and a panel was discussing rightwing pressure on the media, and how it causes people to think twice or not be as aggressive as their journalistic integrity would otherwise lead them to be.

So part of the idea behind Media Matters was to try to balance that criticism and pressure from the progressive side. You simply can’t have 90 percent of email and phone and fax traffic coming into a newspaper ombudsman from just one ideological perspective. That will inevitably change the culture of the institutions over time. So if we could empower progressives to voice their own concerns about what they’re seeing, over time you might get a 50-50 balance in terms of pressure, and that would give us a better product.

MJ.com: What sort of impact do you expect Media Matters will have on the media?

DB: I’ll tell you about one short-term effect we’ve had. One of the central ideas behind the organization was to capture the content of the top talk radio show hosts in the country. Radio content is never captured and catalogued in a systematic way, so there’s no way to hold radio show hosts accountable for their words. But on the week we launched, the Abu Ghraib prison photos were released, and we had our system in place to record and professionally transcribe Rush Limbaugh’s reaction. So we were able to catch a whole string of comments in which he said that torture was a brilliant maneuver and compared the abuse to a college fraternity prank. It was offensive across the board, and showed how out of the mainstream Limbaugh is. That got a lot of attention, Limbaugh spent time defending himself, and in the end, there was legislation introduced in the Senate because of it. Basically, Limbaugh broadcasts on Armed Forces Radio and Television Services — which is a taxpayer funded service — and he’s the only partisan host to get a full hour of time. So we started a position to get him pulled off the air and stop propagandizing our troops, and the new legislation that passed in the Senate will at least force the broadcasts to offer opposing points of view.

We have other goals that might be harder to measure. One of the things that conservatives have successfully done over the years is to anesthetize people to the fact that they are extreme. Limbaugh has engaged in a process of mainstreaming himself, to the point where during the November 2002 election, NBC News had Limbaugh on as an election night analyst. But when we monitor his show, we find that he’s the same old Limbaugh, making racist and sexist comments on his program every day. It’s possible that NBC doesn’t even know what goes on in his show, so by hiring him, everybody just accepts the fact that he’s a leading conservative and he should be on mainstream television. We want to reverse that mainstreaming process and let people understand exactly who these conservative pundits really are.

Also, when we correct misinformation that’s out there, we make an effort to deliver these corrections to people debating on TV. For example, we did some original research on the co-author of the Swift Boat book, Jerome Corsi, and we found that he had made all these bigoted postings to a rightwing website. So we try to deliver that to people, let people know that’s out there, and in this case we saw a lot of pundits who were debating the book and saying maybe that’s something we should consider when we’re weighing the credibility of the book. So that has an impact.

In the longer term, we want to ask whether its possible for those people we’re monitoring to be more responsible. Take the case of Bill O’Reilly, who probably has the highest rate of false statements of anybody that we monitor in the media. O’Reilly was on Tim Russert’s show with Paul Krugman a few weeks ago. Krugman was able to go to our website, get transcripts of O’Reilly’s radio show, and hold O’Reilly accountable for things he had previously said. O’Reilly knew exactly where those transcripts came from, because we’re the only ones who are doing that, and he blew his top. Now the question is, if O’Reilly knows he’s being monitored, will that induce him to be more careful? Right now, we’re too young to really know. Our role is to let his listeners know that they’re getting information that is incorrect. Over time we’re trying to reduce the impact of the false information on people who are making decisions about what policies and candidates they support.

MJ.com: What do you think viewers of the convention should be watching out for?

DB: The main thing is to look for the susceptibility of the mainstream media to adapt storylines that are advancing the agenda of the conservatives. For example, one of the emerging themes from the Republican camp seems to be that, because Kerry talked about his Vietnam record at his convention, somehow he induced or invited people to make up lies about him. Over time this is how conventional wisdom gels in the media, and before you know it, it will have been Kerry’s fault that he was the subject of a vicious and false attack. Those are the kinds of things people should be looking for and be very careful and concerned about.

 

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/republican-noise-machine

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/2002/03/David_Brock_031802.html

In typical “liberal press” style, publications like “Salon” and the “Washington Post” have taken potshots at David Brock’s new book, “Blinded by the Right,” and questioned the motives of the author. It’s all too typical of the flaccid, overwrought efforts of the allegedly “liberal media” to bend over backwards to eat their own.

The right-wing Republican media pundits march in lock step behind books that bolster their political goals. The average so-called “liberal press” book reviewers usually run around trying to eat their own tails in a misguided attempt to prove that they are being “fair.”

What results, of course, is just the opposite. In the case of David Brock’s new book, the criticisms from the so-called “liberal media” (with the exception of a few publications, such as the “New Yorker”) are a grave injustice to the book and to Brock.

“Blinded by the Right” provides an insider’s account into the right-wing conspiracy that attempted to entrap and impeach a democratically elected President of the United States. The seminal book “Hunting of the President,” by Jon Conason and Gene Lyons, provides the definitive account of the strategy that the right-wing used, beginning before Clinton was even elected, to stalk and entrap a President. “Blinded by the Right” fills in and confirms the details, as Brock explains his own personal transformation from eager journalistic “hit man” to repentant confessor. In the process, we learn that even federal judges at the highest level were willing participants in the Clinton character assassination and entrapment strategy.

http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2001/jul/010702.brock.html

July 2, 2001 — Journalist David Brock, whose 1993 book attacked the credibility of law professor Anita Hill, now says he printed lies about Hill following her testimony against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In an exclusive interview, NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg talks to Brock about the confession, detailed in a forthcoming book.

Brock now says that, when he was writing for the conservative magazine The American Spectator and researching his book The Real Anita Hill, he was a tool of right wing activists who fed him false information about Hill. At the time, Brock tells Totenberg, he accepted the truthfulness of the information without checking. But he since has learned he helped spread lies, he says, and is trying to set the record straight in a memoir due out next month. Brock tells Totenberg he even tried to contact Hill in 1998 to apologize, but ultimately “didn’t have the guts” to talk to her.

The Washington Post   2/26/2002

From the time he arrived in Washington in 1986, David Brock sought refuge in the bosom of the conservative movement. Smart, ambitious and tightly wound, he struggled to balance his life as a closeted gay man with the friendships of political and media warriors — some of whom, he says, would make anti-gay remarks.

When his career imploded and the right abandoned him, Brock lost more than his professional footing. The social life he had constructed for himself unraveled

In his new book, “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,” Brock writes about his seduction and eventual excommunication by the conservative movement.

Brock was online to discuss his book, his career and today’s Washington Post article Right and Wrong (Post, Feb. 26, 2002).

A transcript follows.

Editor’s Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

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Alexandria, Va.: I’m a big believer that the “vast right wing conspiracy” is a lame defense used by Hillary Clinton and her left wing, liberal friends to excuse the deplorable behavior of her husband. Do you have any “inside” info on this supposed “conspiracy?”

David Brock: Hillary Clinton was right that there was well-organized, heavily financed right-wing conspiracy that was determined to drive Clinton from office. In the book, I write quite a bit about how the conspiracy worked from the inside, because I was recruited into it by a financier of Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC during the 1992 presidential campaign. The conspiracy came to center on the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit; her key legal adviser admitted to me in a private conversation that he did not believe Jones but wanted to use her allegations as a way of setting a perjury trap for Clinton. I think if you read the book you’ll see that the right-wing conspiracy is laid out in such detail that it is hard to deny.

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Dupont, Washington, D.C.: The word in the glbt community is that you were “pushed” out of the right when they found out you were gay — not really a change in philosophy at all as much as the end of a marriage of convenience. If you hadn’t been “outed,” wouldn’t you still be there?

David Brock: Actually, the conservatives found out that I was gay when I outed myself in the Washington Post in early 1994 just after publishing the Troopergate article. There were no negative repercussions for my career in the right-wing; in fact, many prominent conservatives came to my defense. They were willing to tolerate the fact that I was gay because I was forwarding their agenda. Only when I deviated ideologically later in 1996, as I was breaking with them politically, did I begin to hear anti-gay remarks that must have reflected their true sentiments all along.

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Washington, D.C.: Admittedly, there are undoubtably “excesses” on the conservative side of politics. But isn’t the liberal side just as bad? Why favor one over the other? They are both pretty scummy.

David Brock: My book is about more than the excesses of politics as usual. The campaign of character assassination waged by the right was a singular, unprecedented effort. Nothing like it exists on the left. What I object to on the right is the obsessive hatred, the bigotry, and the personal savaging of their opponents, all achieved through an echo chamber of talk radio, the internet & Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets. That kind of well-funded disinformation campaign has no analog on the left.

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Macon, Ga.: What is your opinion of Ann Coulter?

David Brock: Ann is an illustration of how a certain kind of virulent right-wing politics is based on emotion, not reason. Almost to a one, I found that the most hateful voices on the right were venting their own deep-seated problems and frustrations.

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Ethical query: Interesting topic. According to the article, you made quite a bit of money from your previous right-wing work, which you’ve now repudiated. Do you have any plans to atone for profiting from your previous falsehoods? It’s not like you can give the money back, but I can’t see another book as the answer, since — and I make a good living as a writer, so I’m sympathetic — the new book is both a way of publicly recanting your former position and making more royalties.

I hope you take this, as I’m really interested in the answer.

David Brock: Well, since I am a writer, and I found myself in the middle of an amazing story, I don’t know how else I could tell it without writing it down in book form. If this was about making money, I would have stayed in the right-wing & given them the hatchet job book they wanted on Hillary Clinton. I anticipate giving as much of the royalties on this current book as I can to charities or causes that reflect my beliefs and values.

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Vienna, Va.: You say now you were lying then. How do we know you’re not lying now?

David Brock: My book is truthful and I think that any fair-minded reader will reach that conclusion. But I acknowledge that it is a difficult issue. I had two choices. One was to keep quiet about the problems in my past work and move on. The other was to admit what I did & correct the record. I think the second path is the more credible.

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Burke, Va.: I’m still intrigued by what motivated Paula Jones. Was it politics, money, or sincerity?
From your vantage point, do you think she was sincere in her allegations?

David Brock: I can’t really speak to Paula Jones’ motivations, but I document in the book exactly how she was manipulated by conservative advisers into suing Clinton. So the case was politically motivated. As to the merits of her allegations, I think the court that threw out her case was definitive.

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Pacific, Wash.: I understand that you have stated an apology to him, but in your view, what, specifically, in your reporting on former President Clinton still stands as being true and what do you believe stands as not being true?

David Brock: I can’t stand by the piece that I apologized for, Troopergate, as being accurate. The troopers were later paid off for having talked to me and two of them recanted what they told me when put under oath in the Jones case. Your question prompts me to raise a wider point: It is not only my own writing on Clinton that was deeply flawed. Much of what the right put out about Clinton in the 90s was flatly untrue. The Spectator published fabrications under several by lines, not just mine. There are a lot of people who owe apologies and need to come clean.

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Kensington, Md.: I just wanted to say “Thank You.” I myself once used to be a tool of the evil right wing (not that the left is much better). I am happy to see that there are others who finally decided enough is enough. Thank you David, don’t let anyone bring you down. You courage is an example for others.

David Brock: Thanks for your encouragement. I wonder how many other ex-conservatives there are out there?

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Arlington, Va.: “Nothing like it exists on the left?” Come now, Mr. Brock, I think the late John Tower would disagree with you quite a bit as would Bob Packwood. Do not attribute the motives of those who opposed Bill Clinton as being motivated by hatred, bigotry, etc. That is the usual canard hoisted by the PC police of the left when they want to discredit their opponents without resorting to serious argument. I could have cared less what Clinton did in his private life but when one is sworn in court to tell the truth one must do so regardless of what one thinks are the merits of the suit.

David Brock: John Tower was brought down by Paul Weyrich, a leader of the New Right & a pioneer in the sexual McCarthyism of the right. Packwood, of course, was undone by his own actions, which were exposed in the mainstream press. I lived among the Clinton-haters for years, and I can assure you that my portrait of them is not a canard. The major Clinton-haters in Arkansas were segregationists & hated Clinton for his progressive record on race.

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Arlington, Va.: I haven’t noticed the LA Times publishing any retractions to their story on Troopergate which closely followed yours. And how would you characterize Christopher Hitchens — another right-wing hit man? As to the allegation that the left has no similar “attack” structure, exactly what was Sid Blumenthal’s job in the White House except as to function in exactly that role?

David Brock: Most journalists never admit they were wrong. The Los Angeles Times made many of the mistakes that I did.
I don’t know what Sidney’s job was at the White House, but if it involved disseminating the truth about the right-wing’s operations, I don’t think that is the kind of “attack structure” I’m referring to. The “attack structure” of the right has no regard for the truth of an allegation so long as it is politically useful.
As for Hitchens, I have a section on him in the book that is too long to summarize here.

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Massanutten, Va.: David — My personal background is much like yours in that I was adopted, long-closeted, and drawn at one time to the homophobic ideology of the right-wing political movement. Do you think your involvement with the right was in some way an effort to deny or repress your homosexuality, or perhaps to “atone” for it? Good luck with the book — I’ll have to read it soon.

David Brock: Yes, in my own personal experience as well as those of others I knew, one of the things that drove my extremism was as compensation for the fact that I was gay in a movement that was hostile to gays. I was openly gay in college then reverted to the closet as I rose through conservative ranks. At a certain point, I even began to resent being gay because I saw it as an impediment to career success on the right. That anger came through in my work I’m afraid.

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Fundamental question: Why did you do it? I couldn’t complete a piece if I knew I was lying. Certainly not if I had to put my name on it.

David Brock: Most of my work I did from conviction as I was doing it and only later realized how flawed it was. The one conscious lie I told in print was in a review I wrote of Jill Abramson’s and Jane Mayer’s about the Thomas-Hill hearings called “Strange Justice.” They reported on Thomas’s penchant for pornography. Even though I knew this was true, I covered it up in the review to protect Thomas, and the conservative cause. Also, I was so wrapped up in my identity as Thomas’s chief defender doing anything else (such as revealing the truth about him) would have caused me to come apart.

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College Park, Md.: I have yet to read your book, but at least from the article today and from various reports of your exploits over the years, a few obvious questions leap out:
– Assuming we are all works-in-progress, how do you feel about where you are in your evolution as a person, and how much have you been able to integrate facets of your personality — intellectual, political, spiritual, sexual, etc. — that were previously compartmentalized?
– What have you learned about yourself in terms of your morals and ambitions? (i.e. what price is too high to get what you want?)
– What do you ultimately hope to accomplish as a person? (And I’m not speaking professionally, I’m speaking in terms of the sum total of your being.)
P.S. I wish you peace and happiness (finally)!

David Brock: I think I’m running out of time here so I’ll give a brief answer to a long & very thoughtful question. It’s only since coming out of the right wing that I’ve been able to see beyond partisan politics and careerism to what’s really important in life. I was living in a mutual use society and as a result never learned what true friendship is, or how to give rather than take. As you say, self-discovery is something that happens every day if we are open to it. With the blinders off and the anger gone, now I am. As for future accomplishments, I’ve struggled for a long time to find a complete sense of self and to find my values. If I can live them every day, I’ll be happy.

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David Brock: There were so many great questions I went several minutes over my time limit. Thanks to everyone for participating.

 

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/02/politics/brock022602.htm