American Politics Journal

Brock's Bombshell
It turns out that Clarence Thomas was the one who was "a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty"
By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Friday, June 29, 2001 (APJP) -- Cheer up, right wingers! Remember, when it's raining crap, make crapola! Always look on the Brock side of life!

The embarrassments and setbacks you suffer now for all your little lies and malice have just been supplanted by attention focused on your major lies and malice. Perhaps the public won't notice that behind your cynical and corrupt exterior lies a heart that is also cynical and corrupt.

There are so many things to talk about right now. The GAO is threatening your Veep with legal action because he's stonewalling, and the White House is coming up with the amazing rationale for his resistance by claiming that major corporations . . . excuse me . . . poor, average Joes like Exxonmobil and Reliant have a reasonable expectation of privacy when brib...er, meeting with high public officials.

I think even the tame religionists you keep in your faith-based stables are going to have trouble swallowing that one. My, I was rolling on the floor, laughing. I wrote a parody piece just a couple of days ago about a Mafioso Supreme Court judge, and I had him saying something very much like what Cheney is saying. My version was that corporations had a right to expect privacy when donating to politicos.

It's getting harder and harder to parody Republican sleaze. You keep topping everyones' most vivid imaginations! But gosh, guys, it's not because we lack imagination. It's just that you're GOOD at what you do. Really, really good. I guess "good" is the word I want...

There was the embarrassing spectacle of that push poll your boys ran in Montana. You got some outfit that works with the GOP all the time to call up people and ask them a bunch of loaded questions about the phony "energy crisis" your Spiro Agnew clone conjured up for us. I don't know if your boys got an attack of the stupids, or they just thought those dumb hicks in Montana would be easy to fool, but one of them was promised a letter for him to send to his Congressman and Senator and the White House, encapsulating his views and letting the powers-that-be know that he wanted something DONE and done right NOW, yada, yada, yada.

Well, the package with the letter in it arrived, and it was really impressive. It had a fake letterhead at the top with his name on it, and it looked like it was pumped out on a home ink jet printer, and had some little deviations in it so it didn't look like a form letter, and it was all ready for him to sign and send out, a preemo example of a mass mailing disguised to look like genuine grass roots outrage, the very latest in high-tech, realistic-looking astroturf.

But there was one little problem. It didn't reflect the constituent's views. In fact, it was pretty much 180 degrees away from them. He wasn't amused. He contacted his local newspaper, and they had fun writing this scam up.

Now, you should realize that people got pissed about that. Heavy-handed and dishonest, sure, and that's what people expect from the GOP. But in this case, elected representatives no longer know if mail they are getting is from concerned constituents, or some well-funded sleazy outfit like Tony Feather's "Progress for America". That confusion effectively eliminates the voice of honest constituents, which suits Feather and the GOP just fine.

People don't like having their voices stolen by well funded counterfeiters. Go to hell, Tony, and take your phony letterheads with you.

Well, if the right wing can't fool a bunch of Montanans, maybe they can get the kiddies. ABC invited kids to interview for a program they were planning to run on the environment, under a feature called (I'm not kidding) "Kids say the darndest things". How cute.

What ABC forgot to mention is that the guy doing the interviewing was John Stossel, a journalistic thug who makes his living acting as a propaganda tool for the extraction industries. The parents of the children learned that not only was he interviewing their kids, but apparently coaching them. He was asking variations on the same question over and over, seeking to pry out the answers he wanted, hoping, apparently, to show that the kids opposed nuclear power despite the fact that not one of them had a doctorate in physics. The parents hit the roof and rescinded their permissions for the interviews.

ABC announced they were pulling the segment altogether. Stossel, of course, reacted disgracefully, chiming in with other bloate thugs on the right such as Rush Limbaugh, branding the parents who pulled their permissions for the interviews as "totalitarian leftists". How DARE they shield their children from a vicious ideological kook who wants to lead five year olds to the types of answers on environmental issues that he wants?

"Totalitarian leftists". That's the new VRWC term for parents who want to protect their kids from predators. That's a pretty amazing example of newspeak there, guys.

Then it turned out that Bush's tax scheme did exactly what everyone who isn't a corporate whore said it would do: it wiped out most of the projected surpluses for the next four years and gave the money to the rich. The CBO came out with its new estimate and the projected surplus has dropped from $489 billion to $127 billion. People are going to be real thrilled to know that not only did Putsch and the GOP congress piss 80% of that money away on the undeserving rich, but that it will cost tax payers an extra $30 billion a year in interest on the now-unreduced debt.

There was a blow-up among the NY press, with columnist Jimmy Breslin openly accusing Murdoch of installing a racist in charge of one of Murdoch's papers, and having the paper react by panning Breslin's new book. If you think that was crude and heavy-handed on the part of Murdoch, reflect on the fact that this is the man who tried foisting a $4.5 million bribe to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich off as a "book advance". It was just the sheerest coincidence that there happened to be legislation before the House that would permit Murdoch to triple the amount of media in the US that he controlled. The legislation - surprise! - passed, and Murdoch made billions. Watch for an on-going smear campaign against Breslin.

And the latest polls came out, showing that Putsch had sagged to a mere 51-48 approval rating in the latest Zogby poll. The worst rating for a President since . . . oh, gosh. Pappy. Clinton's fortunes never fell that low. Gee, I bet that stings. Will there be a smear campaign against Zogby, too?

But the right wing should be happy, because instead of a half a dozen corrosive political setbacks, you only have one really big one to contend with, and that's the David Brock story.

Now, Brock was one of the brightest stars of the VRWC, along with Rush Limbaugh, Bill Safire, most of the for-big-pay TV commentators, and the rich white trash over at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He broke the story of Paula and the Troopers, thus treating the country to years of staring at Paula Jones' face and recoiling from Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg and all the other harpies and doyennes of the far right. Who could forget the speculations on the Presidential pecker that Brock led us through, and the endless repetitions of the goofy and cruel Vince Foster conspiracy theories?

When Brock admitted last year that he sorta made that old Troopergate thing up, it didn't much matter. The rest of Richard Scaife's smear machine was doing a pretty good job of drowning out a salient fact about 95% of all the "Clinton scandals", namely, that they weren't true. Troopergate was already a dead issue, along with all the others, and the media circus had moved on. Between smearing Gore and pretending that Putsch was moderate, or even sentient, they were able to drown out that embarrassing little admission.

But right when the media was starting to notice little things like Stossel and Breslin and Cheney and Montana (and defections in the House and Senate and the sagging economy and the reality behind the tax cut and and and....), Brock dropped another bombshell.

At a time when public respect for the Supreme Court was already at an all-time low, Brock admitted that he, along with Rush Limbaugh and other members of the Republican smear machine, deliberately and maliciously lied about items in the Clarence Thomas nomination.

Specifically, he worked with Republicans and Rush Limbaugh and others during the nomination fight to get the word out that Hill was a demented groupie who was, in Whorin' Hatch's unforgettable phrase, "a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty". (Be sure to write and tell us what your afterlife is like, Hatch!). He lied later, during damage control on the book "Strange Justice" which documented Hill's claims against Thomas and essentially exonerated her, by claiming that there was no evidence that Thomas ever rented X-rated video tapes, when there in fact was.

There's more. He describes Thomas' role in discrediting Anita Hill as "complicit", and says that "Thomas was fighting dirty, and so was I". He admitted that he intimidated one witness named Savage, and said, "I not only wrote a book I now believe was wrong, I consciously lied in print in a book review on this subject."

Anita Hill, the woman savaged by the right wing smear machine after being thrust into the limelight because she interfered with the ascension of their puppet justice, would not comment publically on Brock's revelations, but she can be forgiven if she feels at least some measure of satisfaction at this belated truth coming out.

With Thomas, of course, the question is if the man has either the morals or the mentation to perceive that his already low public esteem has just taken a massive hit. Given that he exemplifies the "win at any cost" mentality of the right, he probably wouldn't care, reasoning that he's on the court, and that was the end that justified all means.

But if the right figures that one really massive embarrassment and discrediting is better than a dozen or so, then there is good news: Brock has a book coming out, "Blinded by the Right." The subject of the book, unsurprisingly, is the VRWC, Hillary Clinton's Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

I suspect it will have more than enough in it that for a while, at least, the public will not be paying attention to the fact that the President is a moron, some of the Court Justices are moral disgraces, the rich are robbing us blind, our freedoms are being sold to corporations and religious whacks, and much of our so-called media is nothing more than paid liars and whores for the right.

When people are watching one really big series of lies and deceits, they won't be paying attention to all the others you are perpetrating now.

At least, that's your best hope. Sleep well.