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http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/tucker17.html

Turncoat and Airhead

by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (NY: Crown Publishers, 2002) is one of those books that you buy for the index. The advance word on it was that David Brock, the author of scathing books and articles on Anita Hill and Bill Clinton in the 1990s, had turned against his own to rat out the conservative-movement slime that crawl around Capitol Hill.

(snip)

Some people say that Brock is trying to remake himself so as to be presentable to the mainstream media crowd. Now, why would anyone think that? Can we possibly doubt the sincerity of someone who pens the following: “Only as I gave up my cherished place in the movement, which allowed me to confront the false right-wing ideology of exclusion, intolerance, prejudice, and hate that I had advanced so blindly, did I find my conscience and principles underneath.”

A Maoist training camp couldn’t have created a better puppet.

And yet, there’s a point to such people, as when they let loose with all sorts of naughty revelations against the DC minicon crowd:

One night, after downing several cocktails and snorting an unidentifiable white powder an acquaintance had given me – which turned out to be the cat tranquilizer Ketamine – I was sick in the bathroom for several hours trying to get my bearings as Laura [Ingraham], in a drunken stupor, crawled through the packed two-story dance club on her hands and knees looking for me. Her purse had been locked in my car trunk, causing her to call a friend in the wee hours of the morning to rescue her. In the meantime, she had managed to leave me a series of violent messages, threatening to “break every window in my house” if I didn’t return the keys immediately.

Sniffing an unidentifiable powder that turns out to be cat tranquilizer? What planet is this? No regular person behaves this way in the real world. But Brock tells the story as if to rat out Laura, oblivious as to how it makes him look.

He also turns out to be a hit-and-run criminal:

During the months of drunken carousing before I settled down to work on the book [on Hillary], I crashed my Mercedes into another car while attempting to park it near my house. Very drunk and scared, I raced my car across Washington’s Key Bridge to my office at the Spectator in Virginia and parked it in the magazine’s underground garage. I stumbled back to Georgetown on foot. I called Mark [Paoletta] at home and told him what had happened. He suggested that I move my car to the lowest floor in the garage, backing it in to hide the dent, leave it there for ten days or so, then whisk it to a nearby auto body shop for repairs. I followed his advice, and from that day forward wondered if Mark was capable of holding the incident over me as a way of keeping me in line ideologically. I was compromised.

Hey, buddy, what about your neighbor’s car you caused untold thousands of dollars of damage to? Any compensation due there? Did you share your million-dollar book advance with the car owner?

About every three pages, Brock reminds the reader that he is gay. Sometimes he’s closeted, sometimes he’s not, and he apparently thinks readers are going to take great interest in this supposed drama, but it’s hard to follow and it’s deadly dull. By his own account, people treated him no differently either way. Only after he turned from right to left did his former friends stop inviting him to parties. You know what he attributes his shunning to? You guessed it: homophobia (”I had been wrong to think that the movement had accepted me as a gay man.”)

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