Was there a Conspiracy?

by Denis Mueller, Mar 2002

 

Confessional conversions make good drama. In the 1940's, such notables as Arthur Koestler (The God That Failed), Richard Wright and Ignazio Silone, all turned away from Communism. For various reasons, they condemned the Stalinist doctrine that they once had followed.

The tradition of left-to-right conversions is now joined by several right-to-moderate left re-evaluations. The most notable of these being David Brock, whose new book describes some of the culture wars of the 1990's. Brock was the darling of the right during these times. His work as a polemicist at the University of California earned him a position for the magazine Insight. Insight was the weekly magazine published by Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Moon and his party's main concern was forwarding a right-wing agenda and sending out his disciples to bother the rest of us.

Brock was hired by the magazine, The American Spectator, and he burst into the spotlight with his scathing book about Anita Hill. He became the darling of such right-wing notables as Rush Limbaugh, George Will and William Buckley. It also received a favorable review by the New York Times and became a best seller.

But Hill was small potatoes compared to his next target, the new President of the United States, Bill Clinton. A few of his allegations were serious stuff -- such as a discredited story that Clinton had offered jobs to state troopers in exchange for their silence on Clinton's sexual activities. Activiites which included a reference to a woman named Paula Jones, whose latest claim to fame is her appearance of Fox's new gift to our culture, "Celebrity Boxing."

Guess what? Brock has now repudiated his former convictions and has said basically that the right-wing conspiracy that Hilary Clinton spoke of was true. Backed by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, whose past will be discussed in a future column, and others funneled money into the Spectator. Perhaps their most serious allegation was the charge that the Clintons had something to do with the death of Vincent Foster, a family friend of the Clintons.

Brock now says that these articles written by a British journalist Ambrose Evans-Prichard was a shoddy piece of journalism. However, the editor of the Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrel was determined to, facts or not, publish the article. Prichard's article was so bad and untrue that Brock, who had begun to have misgivings turned to Ted Olsen, the current Solicitor General of the United States and close friend to Kenneth Starr and asked him to read the article.

Brock thought he was giving the article to a principled conservative but little did he know that Olsen, while acknowledging that Foster had committed suicide, felt that it was more important to discredit the Clintons. Brock was stunned. Olsen cared little for the truth. That, when coupled with the hypocrisy of the demagogues of the right convinced Brock that the radical right was made up of liars and hypocrites. Think about it for a second: aren't Solicitor Generals supposed to be concerned with the truth. Apparently not.

Brock now says that he discredited reporters who wrote that indeed Thomas was a habitual renter of pornography despite the fact that Brock knew their allegations were true. I am no fan of Bill Clinton. I felt that any honorable human being would have resigned, but what the right-wing nuts did was no benefit to any of us. They are liars and scoundrels and someday someone will expose them for what they are. Welcome back David Brock to the human race. Your gift of exposing these creeps is a great gift to history.

Sources: David Brock's Blinded By The Right

Reprinted for Fair Use Only.