Can Anyone Ever Truly Trust David Brock?
This article is a few months old. We know the answer. No, he cannot be trusted. Once a slimy, lying smear merchant, always a slimy, lying smear merchant.
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By the time I first encountered Brock—at the February 1994 Conservative Political Action Conference, at which Paula Jones went public with sexual harassment allegations against the sitting president—he was gleefully reveling in his freshly minted celebrity.
Swarmed by admirers as he autographed copies of The Real Anita Hill , his best-selling book of the previous year that trashed Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas’s principal accuser, Brock told me: “A friend of mine said to me last night, ‘You’re gonna be like Mick Jagger here.’” (Not with all the CPAC conventioneers, however: “He’s in the wrong place,” sniffed prominent social conservative Paul Cameron, expressing disgust at Brock’s exceedingly rare status among the faithful as an out gay man. “Homosexuality,” Cameron added, “is a dead-end lifestyle.”)
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“Contrary to what my patrons expected, I found no silver bullet that would stop the Clintons,” Brock writes in Killing the Messenger. “What I did find was a woman with a steadfast commitment to public service, a clear political vision, and a deep well of personal integrity. I couldn’t write the book conservatives wanted, not without betraying the facts as I saw them—and betraying myself in the process.”
That, funnily enough, is a conveniently revisionist and rather unreliable account of what Brock actually wrote in his Hillary biography, which attributed the failure of her healthcare reform initiative to “not just surprisingly poor judgment on her part but character flaws of a particularly dangerous and self-destructive sort.”
Indeed, in an observation that could be applied to the current email scandal by Clinton’s present-day detractors, Brock wrote two decades ago: “Hillary has failed because she never really accepted the simple truth that legal and ethical structures and standards of accountability exist not just to protect us from the ambitions of the wicked but from the hubris of the good.”
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Say what you will about Brock, it would be foolish to challenge his intimate familiarity with journalism hell; by his own reckoning, he committed countless hellish sins (publishing uncorroborated rumor, fabrications, slander, and in at least one instance blackmailing a source into lying) in the service of his career in the ’90s, when his vocation, as he writes today, was “to get dirt into print.”
One hopes, of course, that Brock has discarded all of the sleazy, lazy habits that initially made him rich and famous, but the nagging feeling that he hasn’t is difficult to ignore—especially in his sustained ad hominem attacks on Carolyn Ryan, until recently the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times (she has returned to Manhattan to run the paper’s political coverage).
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/18/can-anyone-ever-truly-trust-david-brock.html
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