Cerise is out of town on business this weekend, and Twinkle is staying overnight at the vet, leaving me, so I thought, alone for the day. What’s more, I am completely caught up on my work, too. Therefore, I figured I’d relax on the sofa at home with the latest editions of Harpers, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Scientific American and some of my other favorite periodicals.
And so I did this afternoon, a double cappuccino accented with shots of Godiva Dark Chocolate liqueur and Grand Marnier to accompany my reading. About halfway through that cup, however, Veronica walked in and sat down next to me.
“Tom,” she purred, “can you do me a big favor?”
“What?” I inquired with cautious tone. The last time she asked me for a favor, it was to borrow my car because her BMW was in the shop, and she was three hours late returning it.
“Just some advice,” she cooed. “That’s your… raison d’être, after all, isn’t it?”
“It’s my profession,” I admitted noncommittally. “Advice about what?”
“Tell me,” she coyly requested as she made a slow and stealthy move closer, “what you know about David Brock.”
“The founder of Media Matters for America?” I responded with no small amount of surprise. “That David Brock?”
“Mmm hmm,” she nodded, wryly cracking her fetching, yet oddly chilling trademark predator’s smile. “That David Brock.”
“You mean, you’re thinking about…” I began.
“Considering it,” she affirmed, “maybe.”
“That poor bas… I mean… some lucky guy, that David Brock,” I averred. “What’s he done to earn your… ahem, consideration?”
“Gotten his name mentioned – lately,” Veronica explained, “by all the right people in all the right places.”
“So you figure,” I concluded, “it might be worth… ah, investigating… his… um… potential?”
“Exactly,” she whispered softly in my right ear, now close enough for me to become enveloped in the aura of the carefully balanced blend of Issey Miyake and Bulgari BLV she evidently had adorned herself with, all the better to ply me for information.
“He’s… well… “ I began, “ah… a rather unusual person in many respects.”
“In what ways?” Veronica asked as she gently tousled my hair.
“Unusual,” I elaborated as I carefully grasped her right wrist and guided her hand down to the cushion, “in that his political perspective underwent a very profound change over the course of his career.”
“His career,” she pressed, her mouth now in a pout of mock petulance at my discreet rebuff, “as what?”
“As a political paladin,” I told her as I fended off yet another encroachment by her left hand. “Are you by any chance stuck at home and bored today?”
“I guess I must be,” she sighed, pulling away to the other end of the sofa, “if I’m making passes at you. Now what do you mean, David Brock is a political paladin?”
“Well,” I related, “he started out working for the Washington Times’ more conservative sister publication, Insight on the News, doing right-wing hatchet jobs for the Moonies. He got the Clinton administration to exhume one of their ambassadors whom they had buried at Arlington Cemetery because the guy had never been in the service. He broke the ‘Troopergate’ story, too, the one about Arkansas state troopers covering for Bill Clinton’s numerous extramarital affairs when he was governor. You remember Paula Jones, by any chance? It was Brock’s idea to invite her to be the guest who represented Insight at a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner where Clinton gave a speech.”
“Seems to me,” Veronica mused as she briefly contemplated the ceiling, “that I do recall something about Clinton’s various bimbos – yeah, Paul Jones, that sounds like one of them.”
“Probably the most notorious one,” I confirmed. “Then Brock went to work for the Heritage Foundation. Remember Anita Hill?”
“No,” Veronica shook her head, “can’t say as I do.”
“Remember the Clarence Thomas hearings?” I prodded. “You know – the charges of sexual harassment, the hair on the Coke can, the references to porn movies, all that?”
“Oh, yeah,” Veronica hesitantly confirmed, “now I think I remember something about that. There were congressional hearings on television – back when Old Man George Bush was president. And Thomas got confirmed to the Supreme Court anyway, didn’t he?”
“Correct,” I vouched. “And he’s still there, too, hairy Coke cans, porno movies and all. But in order for him to get confirmed, it was necessary that somebody commit character assassination on Anita Hill, and the person who came after her was none other than David Brock. First he did a hatchet job on her in the American Spectator magazine. Then he wrote a best-selling book aimed at discrediting her, based on that article.”
“Okay,” Veronica concluded, “he’s a conservative Republican operative, then. No problem – those guys are a piece of cake.”
“Not so fast,” I cautioned. “As I said, he’s more complex than that. You see, what happened was, he had an epiphany,…”
“So what?” Veronica shrugged, “most guys have those, don’t they?”
“You’re probably thinking of something else,” I surmised. “What I’m referring to is a sudden realization or comprehension that profoundly changes a person’s values and viewpoint.”
“Oh,” she softly murmured, “in that case, uh-huh, I was definitely thinking of something else. So what caused this big change in David Brock’s outlook?”
“You got me,” I confessed. “I don’t think anybody knows, probably not even him. But round about 1997, Brock wrote a book about Hillary Clinton. It didn’t sell very well, though, and that must have disappointed his publishers, who paid him seven figures up front to write it. Anyway, later that year, he did a complete one-eighty and wrote an article for Esquire magazine in which he renounced the right wing and recanted all of his work for them. Then, in 2002, he wrote another book, Blinded by the Right. He complained that his so-called friends and allies in the conservative movement had vilified him for not being hard enough on Hillary Clinton in his book about her. Furthermore, he claimed he had gone back and reinvestigated all the charges people like him and House Speaker Newt Gingrich had made against the Clintons and determined that they were all just so much hogwash. Now, he claimed, he knew that the whole Whitewater affair – special prosecutor and all – was just a politically motivated witch hunt. After that, came his book The Republican Noise Machine, in 2004, which basically said that yes, there is, in fact, a vast right-wing conspiracy which funds biased news organizations, biased columnists and biased academics to say what rich, powerful conservatives want to them to say. Then he founded Media Matters for America, a tax exempt 501(3)(c) organization ostensibly dedicated to being a watchdog against right-wing conservative manipulation of the media.”
“So,” Veronica fretted, “you’re telling me he went from being a right-wing fanatic to being a left-wing fanatic.”
“Correct,” I agreed, “with the key, operative term being the word ‘fanatic.’ David Brock, it seems, doesn’t really care so much what he believes in, as long as, whatever it is, he can be unabashedly, unrestrainedly and unreasonably fanatical about it.”
“So that must mean,” she posited, “that, whatever it is he believes in at the moment, he believes in it passionately.”
“Very much so, indeed,” I concurred. “And it’s that raging fire in his belly which has put his name on everyone’s lips – in the cloistered, incestuous hothouses of the media and Washington, at least. You see, that passion of his has apparently bubbled over into frank lunacy. He’s taken to going everywhere with a security detail to protect him from right-wing assassins. He avoids roofs and open spaces in order to foil snipers. His assistants walk around armed with concealed handguns. His home has a very elaborate, state-of-the-art security system. He’s admitted to intense drug abuse, and a lot of people claim he behaves erratically, even to the point of accusing one of his bodyguards of plotting against him. Employees at Media Matters walk around on egg shells, scared they’ll be fired for some insane reason. Mike Huckabee has speculated that Brock’s a paranoid schizophrenic, and Media Matters has been accused of taking money from notorious liberal bogeymen George Soros and Bill Moyers, and from notorious liberal bogeywoman Barbara Streisand, too – all to use for undue, illegal influence on the media, that…”
“Illegal?” Veronica interrupted.
“Insofar,” I explained, “that, as a 501(3)(c) tax exempt organization, it’s illegal for Media Matters to behave like, say, Rupert Murdoch, for instance, and pay money to have a particular political viewpoint espoused in the media, such as, for example, Murdoch does on Fox News.”
“Oh, well,” Veronica opined with a flounce of her lavish locks, “it doesn’t sound all that much illegal.”
“I wasn’t aware,” I chided, “that illegality is a question of degree.”
“Obviously,” she chuckled, “you’ve never… ah… talked… your way out of a speeding ticket, then.”
“As a matter of fact,” I flatly replied, “I’ve never had one.”
“That’s my Tom,” she chuckled, “always such a good boy. So David’s somewhat… unstable… and maybe he… um…. stretches the rules a bit now and then, would you say?”
“Yes,” I acknowledged, “although, in my opinion, that’s putting it rather mildly, to say the least.”
“Well,” Veronica philosophized, “I always try to accentuate the positive aspects of every situation. So, is all this over-the-top behavior the reason I’ve been hearing David Brock’s name dropping everywhere this week?”
“There’s a couple more things,” I advised. “First, it seems that someone leaked a Media Matters organizational planning memorandum, and it contains a number of quite controversial statements.”
“Such as what?” Veronica wondered.
“It claims, for example,” I told her, “that Media Matters is essentially writing most of the prime-time content for MSNBC. It also claims that Media Matters was instrumental in getting Lou Dobbs fired from CNN. The memo says Media Matters accomplished that by threatening to run advertisements against Ford motor company in major Spanish language markets.”
“So what?” Veronica shrugged.
“So,” I clarified, “Lou Dobbs is an anti-immigrant demagogue and Ford was a major sponsor of his show.”
“Oh,” she declared. “Now I get it. Sounds like a dirty trick some conservative might pull, but David Brock pulled it for the liberals instead. Why not, I guess – fair’s fair. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and all that.”
“The memo also claims Media Matters got Glenn Beck to ‘transition off’ of Fox,” I continued. The memo also claims that liberal bloggers – it cites the Washington Post’s Greg Sergeant as an example – will print anything Media Matters gives them, practically verbatim. It also goes on to name a number of other liberal bloggers who have used content ghost-written for them by Media Matters, including Jim Rainey at the LA Times, Brian Stelter at the New York Times, Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle and two other people at the Washington Post – Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne.”
“Well,” Veronica rationalized, “if David Brock’s organization produces interesting content, why shouldn’t it be posted on the Internet?”
“That must be, more or less,” I concluded, “what all those liberal bloggers where thinking. Sure beats writing it themselves, I’m sure. Then there was a second memo, which proposed a ‘Fox fund’ to which interested parties could contribute, dedicated to the demise of Fox News, calling for a ‘presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.’”
“Okay,” Veronica observed, “I can see that. It’s the same kind of thing I hear conservatives talk about all the time – it’s just that they’re targeting liberal media outlets like the Huffington Post.”
“True,” I agreed, “it’s not like Media Matters came up with an entirely original idea with that one. On the other hand, the memo went on to suggest that Media Matters ‘hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters and prominent contributors,’ to dig up dirt which could be used to ruin them, as well as hiring ‘trackers’ to stalk those people at public and private events; and even went so far as to suggest placing a ‘mole’ working for Media Matters on the Fox payroll. It further suggested exploration of possible class action lawsuits or other forms of legal action that could be brought against Fox News, as well as forming a ‘front group’ of individuals to buy stock in Fox News’ parent corporation and use the access such ownership provides to disrupt its activities.”
“Outstanding,” Veronica gasped. “Very impressive. You know, I believe I like the way David Brock thinks!”
“If you like the way David Brock thinks,” I ventured, “then I’m sure you would love the way Richard Nixon did, because all that stuff is straight out of his dirty tricks playbook – it’s just been recast in a media business context, that’s all.”
“Really? Because Nixon,” she breathlessly confided, “has always been my favorite president.”
“Knowing you,” I assured her, “there’s absolutely nothing surprising in that.”
“Right!” Veronica happily asserted, “so David Brock and I should be a perfect match!”
“Except,” I cautioned, “for one thing. He’s gay.”
“Oh, [expletive]!” Veronica shouted. “Why didn’t you say so? Dishonest men, selfish men, violent men, I can handle. Cowardly men, obsessed men, weak men, flawed men, evil men, crazy men – Washington’s full of them, just like Manhattan or Hollywood – no problem! But gay men? Forget about it – there’s nothing I can do!”
“Maybe,” I suggested, “that’s simply because you never tried.”
A long, quiet moment passed. At last, Veronica arose and walked out of the living room, up the stairs. “Interesting point,” she remarked as she departed, “I’ll take it as a challenge. Of course, I’m going to have to do some… very special shopping first.”