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

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (12326)	3/26/1998 4:52:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 20981

Some intelligent perspective on the women's groupers hypocrisy (and Geraldo): Dear Camille: What do you think of David Brock's apology to President Clinton in the new Esquire? He was the reporter who exposed the "Troopergate" story in the American Spectator, which kicked off the whole Paula Jones fiasco. Now he says the troopers were slimy and his own get-Clinton vendetta helped create a media Frankenstein. What do you make of Brock's twists and turns? Dizzy in D.C. Dear Dizzy: "Twists and turns" certainly says it. Behold, the writhing snake pit of amoral media ambition! I haven't been so revolted since -- well, since the first news flash that the president of the United States may have been foolishly monkeying around with a big-busted, juicy-lipped intern. I am personally furious with David Brock's recent "slimy" behavior -- to apply to him the word he now uses for the working-class Arkansas state troopers he once touted as sources -- because I went out of my way to defend his solidly researched 1994 book, "The Real Anita Hill." It was then under vicious attack by those cozy media insiders, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, whose own 1994 book, "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," was in my view a shallow piece of PC crap, grossly overpraised by reviewers and commentators in thrall to the feminist establishment, for whom Hill was a reincarnation of Mary, Mother of Jesus. Indeed, on my book tour for "Vamps & Tramps" that year, I stormed out of Spago restaurant in Los Angeles after a huge scene with a book editor of the Los Angeles Times, when he blithely insisted there was no ethical problem in the Times having assigned its review of the Mayer-Abramson book to Nina Totenberg -- who as a National Public Radio reporter was an early, active principal in the entire Anita Hill affair on Capitol Hill. This was, I loudly maintained, an excellent example of the cronyism and corruption that distort book reviewing in the United States. As a reform feminist, I have struggled to bring the totalitarian excesses of sexual harassment regulations before the American public, whose schools and workplaces have been invaded by the nightmarish sexual delusions of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. (See my article on sexual harassment, "A Call for Lustiness," in the March 23 Time.) Hill's charges against Supreme Court nominee Thomas were grotesquely overblown, and I protested them from the very start. Unjustly vilified by Mayer and Abramson, the conservative Brock should have been concerned only with patiently proving his professionalism and ethics as a journalist over the long haul. As a libertarian Democrat, I respect anyone whose thinking is genuinely systematic and principled -- which is why I continue to admire conservative talk-radio host and political satirist Rush Limbaugh (despite his soft spot for the narcissistic Newt Gingrich). Brock's lurid, wickedly entertaining expos‚s of the Clintons for the right-wing American Spectator, which were based on his own investigations in Little Rock, helped break the hammerlock that the liberal major media then had on political discourse in this country. Since many of Brock's findings were paralleled by those of the Los Angeles Times (which sat on the story for months), his current mea culpas ring a bit hollow. Brock's desire for mainstream media respectability -- or rather for acceptance among the socialites and schmoozers whose cocktail parties and soirees are the incestuous meeting ground for the Washington-Manhattan power elite -- became clear in his wooden 1996 book, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," which reportedly made him persona non grata at the conservative high table. Brock's nicey-nice treatment of Hillary Clinton -- utterly devoid of psychological insight and truly dumb about the political scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s at Yale University (where the Clintons and I were separately doing graduate work) -- was just as putrid with covert self-interest as the Mayer-Abramson screed that canonized Hill. Brock's PR stunts -- posing as a semi-nude St. Joan in Esquire; offering a fulsome "apology" to the president in the same glossy lifestyle magazine -- are hardly going to help him win journalistic credibility. A sincere person would have published a reserved, factual article in a serious, issues-oriented periodical, without these effete, maudlin gestures. Brock's recantation has all the moral gravity of a gin fizz. Watching Brock make his slippery, unctuous, Stephanopolous-like talk-show rounds last week (Geraldo Rivera stomach-churningly called him "a brave man"), I thought: This pomaded little creep, like Osric the sycophantic courtier in "Hamlet," is now the leading out-of-the-closet gay in the media, after the whiny Ellen DeGeneres and her birdbrained gal pal. Oxygen, please! salonmagazine.com

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (12326)	3/26/1998 6:03:00 PM
From: Janice Shell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

Oh, ok, sorry that the questions offend you, but the Jones case is in fact, a sexual harassment case and oh, dearie me, it seems necessary to ask questions of that nature to establish any pattern of behavior if in fact there is one. Sorry to butt in here, but I really, really do not believe that Jones has the right to screw up the lives of dozens of women just to win her lousy two million smackers. And what's her case? That she didn't get a promotion? She can't even speak decent English. Hate to think how she writes it. Did she deserve a promotion simply because she existed?