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Politics : The Left Wing Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Poet who wrote (4860)	6/27/2001 10:08:08 AM
From: Poet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6089

Maureen Dowd's Op ed piece on the Brock story: (bolds mine) June 27, 2001 LIBERTIES Truth, Sex, Lies and Videotape By MAUREEN DOWD ASHINGTON — When I covered the brutal psychodrama of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill that ferocious week in October '91, I used to wake up in the middle of the night haunted by the mystery of who was telling the Big Lie. How could we put someone on the Supreme Court for life without knowing? But everyone was playing to win, so the truth never really entered into it. Now, a decade later, David Brock, a right-wing hit man who was in league back then with the Bush White House, steps forward to talk about truth and lies. The journalist now says he lied then when he painted Anita Hill as a liar, a woman who was "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty," both in an American Spectator piece and a best seller embraced by conservatives called "The Real Anita Hill." And he says he lied then when he helped the Bushies and conservatives portray Clarence Thomas as truthful, calling himself "a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine." His former conservative allies say that Mr. Brock is lying now in his apologia, contained in a book called "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," to be published in September and excerpted in August's Talk magazine. "I had stumbled onto something big," Mr. Brock writes, "a symbiotic relationship that would help create a highly profitable right-wing Big Lie Machine that flourished in book publishing, on talk radio, and on the Internet throughout the 90's." The '91 hearings turned on the Republican effort to smear Anita Hill as an erotomaniac while suppressing reports popping up from Judge Thomas's friends and supporters that he was often a patron of X- rated movie houses while a student at Yale Law School in the early 1970's, and that he would sometimes humorously describe the pornographic movies to his friends and colleagues, just as Ms. Hill had testified he did with her. To that end, Senator Orrin Hatch said it was unthinkable that Judge Thomas could ever have discussed Long Dong Silver and other porn with her, because anyone who would do that would be "a psychopathic sex fiend or a pervert." Judge Thomas agreed that he would never "approach anyone I was attempting to date as a person with this kind of grotesque language." After he ascended to the Supreme Court, two friends of mine, Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer, wrote a book called "Strange Justice" that reported that, when he worked with Ms. Hill, he regularly rented adult movies at Graffiti, a local video shop stocked with Long Dong Silver movies. In the book, Kaye Savage, a former career civil servant in the Reagan White House and social friend of both Clarence and Anita, said she visited Mr. Thomas's bachelor apartment in the summer of 1982 and saw "explicit photos of nude women." Mr. Brock writes in Talk that he tried to discredit "Strange Justice" in a Spectator review with the help of Justice Thomas and the White House. According to Mr. Brock, he used as an intermediary a Bush White House lawyer named Mark Paoletta to ask Justice Thomas if he had owned video equipment in the early 1980's. "Paoletta," Mr. Brock writes, "came back with a straightforward answer: Not only had Thomas had such equipment in his apartment, he had also often rented pornographic movies from Graffiti during the years that Hill worked for him." Mr. Brock writes that "Thomas passed along, through Paoletta, unverified embarrassing personal information about his friend" Kaye Savage "that Thomas claimed had been raised against her in a divorce proceeding. . . . Thomas was playing dirty, and so was I." Justice Thomas had no comment. Mr. Paoletta told The Times that he had not confirmed to Mr. Brock that Mr. Thomas rented or watched pornography, and said that Justice Thomas "did not ask me to pass along any derogatory information about Kaye Savage." And Ms. Savage told The Times that Mr. Brock had "either got it from Clarence or he got it from Anita, and Anita's my friend." A column last week said that Representative Gary Condit was one of the few Democrats to vote for the impeachment of Bill Clinton; Mr. Condit voted in favor of opening the impeachment inquiry, but in the end voted against impeachment.

To: Poet who wrote (4860)	6/27/2001 10:27:08 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 6089

I stayed away for a week. I'd been reading but not posting. I've been trying half-heartedly for a couple of months now to wean myself. I think it's mostly habit. I was doing really well and then X said something touching and got me going yesterday. I was all set this morning to let it go again but my new computer was giving me fits so I thought I'd take a break and visit someplace familiar for a moment, which was when I saw your message. So here I am again--typing. I didn't miss it for my week off, but then yesterday I jumped back in with both feet. I don't know. SI is good for me in that I'm quite reclusive and this gives me a lazy way to interact with some nice folk like you. But you're right about the five hours. I'm working on turning off the TV, too. I'd forgotten the lovely sound of silence. Amazing. I'm pleased to hear about the new addition to your family. My best cat ever was a Himalayan mix pound kitty. She was really mellow like your new one. Mellow is a fine quality in a pet. And she had the odd habit of following me around the house like a dog. I'm looking forward to settling down somewhere and having a purr-engine in the house again. I saw the article you posted. I'll bet that's an interesting book. Although I've managed to shut down the computer and the TV now and again, I haven't yet picked up a book. I want to read The Wind Done Gone. Have you been following the story of the legal battle with the Gone With the Wind heirs over that? The Times has been giving it good coverage. The author, Alice Randall, is the daughter of a colleague and friend of mine, who died last year. The two of them had been estranged for years and Alice has had some "interesting" things to say about her mother and race, things that seem totally alien when I reflect on my friend. I always thought that Bettie had the world's healthiest attitude on race relations. It seems that there are many more layers to the story. So I need to get me to a bookstore during one of my computer/TV time outs and see what my friend's offspring has produced. Once I have the computer and TV off and a book in hand, then I'll be restored. I think. A book in hand sitting by the pool sipping an iced tea. That surely should do it. Give your new kitty a pat for me, if you can get a quiet moment with him, that is. Karen