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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (10326)	3/12/1998 1:11:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20981

WHAT A SORRY STATEMENT FROM A SORRY INDIVIDUAL By JOHN PODHORETZ "What's more, the apology part only takes up a few lines in your 4,000-word article. You don't say that anything you reported was untrue or wrong." ______________________________________________________________________ David Brock Washington, D.C. DEAR David, I've just read your open-letter "apology" to President Clinton in Esquire magazine. I can't contain my anger and disappointment - anger at the almost boundless hypocrisy you display in your meretricious piece, and disappointment that I had anything to do with launching your career. Alas, I did. I gave you your first job out of college at Insight magazine. I should have left you in Berkeley. I apologize, America. Back then, you were a studious, quiet, preppie 21-year-old with an interest in foreign policy and intellectual matters. You had an ability to write on serious subjects far beyond your years. That's why you were the reporter I sent to Chicago to do our cover story on Allan Bloom's highbrow tome, "The Closing of the American Mind." And that's why it seemed so out of character when, in your first famous article in 1992, you referred to Anita Hill as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty." The sentence appeared in an otherwise sober and splendid American Spectator analysis of the discrepancies in Anita Hill's story. I was told you had said an editor had inserted that now-notorious sound bite. I wonder, now, if that were true because that sentence was certainly a grabber. It got you a lot of attention. And what the Esquire "apology" reveals is just how greedy for attention you really are; your hunger for it is so great it outweighs any convictions you might have. When it satisfied your greed, you wrote with joyous relish about the president's sex life for the American Spectator - the "Troopergate" article in which you revealed the president's peccadilloes and made fateful mention of a woman named "Paula" whom the world would come to know as Paula Jones. But it was not just Clinton's sex life that interested you. What was all that hinting you did in your article on Secretary of State James Baker and the roses he supposedly left on the pillow of a woman who worked for him? Then, when you had a need for attention of a different sort, you wrote a much-discussed article in Esquire last year about how your fellow conservatives made you into a pariah because your book about Hillary Clinton didn't trash her enough. I found that piece especially appalling because just a few months earlier, I was working for the Weekly Standard when I heard you give a talk at a conservative gathering excoriating right-wingers for indulging in rumormongering about President Clinton. Were you ostracized? Hardly. I went up to you and asked if I could publish your talk in the Weekly Standard. And the article appeared soon thereafter. The Standard published a review of your Hillary Clinton book. It was an unfavorable review, whose central point was that "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham" was boring and unilluminating. It's painful to get a bad review. But it's not censorship. I suspect you're really upset that rank-and-file conservatives who made your book on Anita Hill a best seller stayed away from "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham" in droves. They were right to do so; the book did not deserve an audience. Just because Free Press was foolish enough to give you $1 million for it doesn't mean ordinary people have to buy it so that you can earn out your advance. Now you write an article supposedly apologizing to the president for putting his private life on display. But anybody who thinks the apology is heartfelt hasn't spent time hearing you giggle with triumph at your giant-slaying. What's more, the apology part only takes up a few lines in your 4,000-word article. You don't say that anything you reported was untrue or wrong. Instead, you try to prove to the world what a great guy you are because you are supposedly haunted by the evil genie of sex-obsessed journalism you let out of the bottle. And yet you do this while defending your own journalistic techniques; apparently you never did anything wrong except publishing the Troopergate story. You say, "The pieties of the press know no bounds." I say your chutzpah knows no grounds. Usually, apologies invoke a certain humility in the person who apologizes, but not you. Instead, you spend the balance of your piece trashing others, among them the Arkansas state troopers you made famous, Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, even R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the editor of the American Spectator. Tyrrell paid your salary for six years and defended you against all attackers even when it was difficult to do so. Nice of you to accuse him of having no journalistic ethics, David; what about a simple personal ethic, like loyalty to a one-time colleague and defender? Probably you think you don't owe Tyrrell any loyalty because he decided not to renew your contract with the American Spectator. I think if you were still collecting a cool $500,000 from the magazine for three years' work, you wouldn't be expending so much energy trying to cleanse yourself of the conservative taint. The big question on the right when it comes to you is this: Can you really pull it off? You've already gotten a six-figure advance for a memoir of your time on the right, which proves that there is an inexhaustible hunger among liberals in publishing houses for anti-conservative works that will never sell. But will the liberals in the glossy-mag world take these mea culpas at face value and give you those big freelance contracts you want so much? You need a big income to support those three residences you own, after all. They might; they're not very smart. You are. You're also a disgrace. Your former friend, John Podhoretz nypostonline.com