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DIS-patch
The Return of LongDongGate -- It's About Time!
By Dave "Doctor" Gonzo
Thursday, June 27, 2001 -- WASHINGTON (APJP) -- The Doc wants you all to check out this extra-juicy text bite from the August issue of Talk magazine's interview with recovering conservative David Brock:
"I had stumbled on to something big, a symbiotic relationship that would help create a highly profitable, rightwing Big Lie Machine that flourished in book publishing, on talk radio and on the internet [sic] throughout the 90s."
When it rains, it pours -- and reading this little tidbit less than a day after digesting Republican Mac MacArthur's merciless dissection of the New York Times's journalistic brown-nosing of slick Fox News Hoch-Propagandameister Roger Ailes, The Doc can't help but imagine that, at long last, America has a window of opportunity to see the net output of the many hard-right "think tanks," "opinion journals," "pundit shows," and, of course, "analytic biographies" for what they are: an intricate house of half-truth, twisted truth and non-truth "cards" -- which, once you manage to prove that an Ace of Clubs is actually a Joker and remove it, collapses rather quickly.
Last week, The Doc saw one such exquisite implosion, as Bob Somerby exposed Bill "Moonie Times" Sammon as a liar in his now-debunked joke of a book that fails to prove Al Gore "stole" anything.
And over the last couple of days, he has delighted in reading the litany of sniveling and denials coming from the wacko right in the wake of a crucial revelation by Brock, one which weighs heavily on the integrity -- not to mention the legitimacy -- of the dumbest person to sit as a Supreme Court justice in my lifetime.
The Doc refers, of course, to Clarence Thomas, the personal sock puppet of Justice Tony Soprano... er, Scalia.
Brock's story revives the embarrassing and degrading spectacle surrounding credible allegations of sexual harassment by Thomas made before the Senate Judiciary Committee by conservative-leaning professor Anita Hill during then-nominee Thomas's confirmation hearings a decade ago. Some Republicans snidely referred to the incident off camera as "LongDongGate" -- a reference to renowned pornographic thespian Long Dong Silver, whose name had been bandied about during the hearings -- to smear Hill.
But now the (ahem) cocks have come back to roost -- and some on the right now rue the choice of "scandal" nickname.
In his forthcoming book, "Blinded by the Right" (which has already been attacked in a "shades of Hatfield" campaign by the completely untrustworthy Drudge Report, the unintentionally funny Lucianne.com, and other brownshirt web havens), the ex-darling of ultra-right Beltway denizens describes how Thomas used him to blackmail a retraction from Kaye Savage -- who had been highly critical of Thomas in the 1994 book "Strange Justice" by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson -- based on information Brock claims came from Mark Paoletta, a friend of Thomas.
In an interview, Brock said "Thomas was complicit in an effort to discredit another witness against him with negative personal information, which is exactly what he claimed the Anita Hill forces had done to him."
Even more personally embarrassing to the dimwit "Injustice" is Brock's revelation that he knew there was evidence fully supporting the contention by Mayer and Abramson that Thomas was a frequent customer of the X-rated video store Graffiti -- a contention that led tremendous weight to allegations against Thomas by Anita Hill (Brock is also the author of the 1993 slander volume, "The Real Anita Hill"). In a review of "Strange Justice" published in the conserva-wacko, now-floundering American Spectator, Brock described the book as "one of the most outrageous journalistic hoaxes in recent memory."
In "Blinded by the Right," Brock writes, ""When I wrote those words, I knew they were false."
Brock also acknowledges never having interviewed many of the key players in "The Real Anita Hill," writing in his new book, ""I demonized Democratic senators, their staffs and Hill's feminist supporters without ever interviewing any of them.... I was so blinded by my partisan tunnel vision and my tortured desire to make it in the movement that I believed my own propaganda."
And, as one would expect, the people Brock fingers are squealing their denials.
Mark Paoletta disputed Brock's account according to a Washington Post piece by Howard Kurtz earlier this week. Also denying Brock's claims is one Barbara Ledeen, a hard-right activist who, Brock writes, co-wrote a radio script with Brock savaging "Strange Justice" and faxed it to arch-enemy of truth Rush Limbaugh.
Ledeen, however, does not exactly garner a reputation as a paragon of integrity. The Political Amazon e-mailed a few "fun facts" about Ledeen to The Doc, including:
Talk about a woman capable of choke-slamming her own credibility! Oof! Thwack! Welcome to IWF Smackdown!
But I digress.
The bottom line is that Brock's claim that Thomas was in on the fix, along with his admission of involvement in a carefully orchestrated effort to smear Anita Hill and depict her as "a little nutty and a little slutty" while covering up Thomas's taste for hardcore video gratification and strong-arming Thomas's critics to recant the truth, raises the questions: was it mere "complicity" by Thomas -- or did he take a more active role? How much did Clarence know and/or plan -- and when did he know and/or plan it?
It's about time the Senate Judiciary Committee asked some questions of both Brock and Thomas now that Brock claims Thomas was involved in the truth being stretched a little too longy and made far less "dongy."
Who knows? Maybe he'll be forced to resign because of LongDongGate. At least that would save him the humiliation of the impeachment he and the other four Supreme Election Thieves so richly deserve -- and are likely to get once the Democrats take back the House in '02.
'Nuff said.
Copyright © 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc.
