Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [54]
So one could claim that Richard Mellon Scaife set the tone. But as I learned in the seventies, when I personally tried to set the tone of our political culture by repeatedly calling for “a return to niceness,” it’s hard for any one person to shape the character of our national discourse.
No, turning the public arena into a wasteland of personal destruction takes an entire army of like-minded ideologues hell-bent on shredding the already tattered standards of decency that once permitted reasonable discourse on matters of import.
The left, sadly, has no such army. Our attack dogs are a scrawny, underfed pack of mutts that spend half the time chasing their own tails and sniffing each other’s butt. The right, by contrast, appears to have a well-oiled puppy mill for pit bulls, bred to kill and trained to go for the jugular. Or the balls.
David Brock was one of those pit bulls. Brock worked as a professional hate-spewer for the Washington Times, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Spectator. As aggressive dogs will, Brock left his mark everywhere: on Iran-Contra, the Bork nomination, the Thomas-Hill hearings, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Whitewater, and the Clinton impeachment. It was Brock who discredited the very sane, very staid Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”
Later Brock had a change of heart and joined the forces of light. In his mea culpa, Blinded by the Right, Brock describes his days in the right-wing trenches: “I fought on the wrong side of an ideological and cultural war that divided our country and poisoned our politics.”
Brock’s revelations about his scandalous activities on behalf of the fanatical right are often discounted by his former compatriots, who make the uncharacteristically reasonable argument that he lied so much when he was working for them that nothing he says can be trusted now. Fair enough. We’ll leave out Brock’s tale of manufacturing Troopergate out of whole cloth, the bottom-fishing expeditions of the Scaife-funded Arkansas Project, and the payoffs to Whitewater witnesses. I’m not going to use it. Don’t need it. While Brock does shed light on some of the clandestine dirty tricks used by what was, if not a vast right-wing conspiracy, at least a very, very large one, there were enough lies and baseless innuendos right out in the open to fill a book the size of Sidney Blumenthal’s 802-page classic, The Clinton Wars.
For example, did you know that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian? And that, despite her homosexuality, she was having an affair with Vince Foster? Who then had to be murdered to cover up Whitewater? And did you know that Foster’s execution was only one small part of a killing spree that claimed nearly forty lives, including those of former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and the wife of an Arkansas state trooper who apparently didn’t “get the message”? And did you know that Clinton, to finance his own gargantuan cocaine habit, had struck a deal with the CIA and the Contras to smuggle duffel bags filled with coke into Arkansas?
If you didn’t, you weren’t reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the American Spectator, or the Washington Times.
Typically, the Spectator would break the story, “forcing” the Journal, the Times, and the New York Post to comment on what was now a legitimate news item that was being ignored by the liberal-dominated media.
The Journal ran sixty-four editorials discussing Foster’s death, systematically sowing sinister seeds of suspicion on his so-called “suicide.” (I’m putting the right on notice that they don’t own alliteration.) This continued even after two successive independent counsels (one of them, Kenneth