Rush Limbaugh - Page 13 - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

JollyRoger · #**181** 10-05-2007, 02:32 PM

My good man, I am not defending him, I merely wish to tell his particular story and to refute the "George Soros (who is spawn of Satan) financed this web site" meme. Brock is an indeed a turncoat, something that sometime neo-con Hitchens points out in his usual unemotional manner. Brock also has a valid point and one can see it demonstrated profusely each day on his web site, that the Right in this country spews forth a sea of misinformation. Their looseness with the truth makes them quite easy pickings for Mr. Brock, to the point his website is now the target of just what Mr. Brock predicts: a disinformation campaign.

Botnst · #**182** 10-05-2007, 02:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by peragro

Hey, thanks for the link on Wikipedia about MediMatters and David Brock. I never would have found this otherwise:

Minority Report by Christopher Hitchens
The Real David Brock

[from the May 27, 2002 issue]
When incurable liberals like Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman begin using the name Whittaker Chambers as a term of approbation, we are entitled to say that there has been what the Germans call a Tendenzwende, or shift in the zeitgeist. The odd thing is that they have both chosen to compare Chambers's Witness, a serious and dramatic memoir by any standards, to a flimsy and self-worshiping book titled Blinded by the Right, by David Brock. Meyer Schapiro, one of the moral heroes of the democratic left, once said that Whittaker Chambers was incapable of telling a lie. That might well be phrasing it too strongly, but I have now been provoked by curiosity into reading Brock, and I would say without any hesitation that he is incapable of recognizing the truth, let alone of telling it.
The whole book is an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation. How could he, asks the author of himself, have possibly gone on so long in telling lies, smearing reputations and inventing facts? The obvious answer--that he adored the easy money and the cheap fame that this brought him--was more than enough to still his doubts for several years. However, his publisher seems to have required a more high-toned explanation before furnishing him with a fresh tranche of money and renown. And Brock's new story--that he was taken in by a vast right-wing conspiracy--is just as much of a lie as his earlier ones.
On page 128, Brock does what many defectors do, and claims that it was his party, not he, that had changed. The tone of the 1992 Republican convention was the alleged tipping point, with its antigay, anti-1960s, Christian Coalition themes. On page 121 Brock makes the demented assertion that the GOP had "virtually launched an antigay pogrom," before sobbing, "there was far less ideological affinity between the GOP and me than when I had first come to Washington. The party had left me and many other libertarian-leaning conservatives back in Houston." So at least that fixes a date, in what is a very rambling and egocentric narrative. And the date makes it easy to demonstrate that Brock is a phony. His early hero Reagan made alliances with Jerry Falwell, fulminated against the 1960s, refused to mention the term "AIDS" in public and encouraged Jeane Kirkpatrick's veiled attack on the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. As a longtime Bay Area denizen, Brock would have had a hard time missing that last reference, or any of the others. So he's plainly still lying about his past. He's also lying about his future: the "Troopergate" allegations appeared under his name a good while later than 1992, and sometime well after that he was billed as a featured speaker by the Christian Coalition.
Who is such a sap as to take the word of such a person? Brock masks his deep-seated mendacity from others and (perhaps) from himself by a simple if contemptible device of rhetoric. He switches between passive and active. Thus of one conservative smear-op, he tells us that "I allowed myself to get mixed up" in it. His masochism even permits him to say, at a reactionary award ceremony in far-off St. Louis, at which he somehow found himself, that "I was miserable. Yet this was how I made my living and it was who I had become. The conservatives had bought my brain." And paid well over the odds for it, I should say. Never mind, he always cheers up by letting himself be drawn in to another bad business. And here we get the same paltry narcissism in its opposite form: "I was a full-scale combatant, I had war-wounds to show for it, and I needed the thrill of another round of battle."
He finds it difficult to refer to himself--when he isn't crippled by self-loathing--without using the words "icon" and "poster boy." There are actually very few revelations in the book, unless you are surprised to learn that a cabal of right-wingers tried to frame the Clintons for killing Vince Foster. (Brock now prefers the even more far-out view that Foster was murdered by the Wall Street Journal.) Referring to the anti-Semitism of a famous conservative, he cites what might be a joke in poor taste and says it was "one of her gentler remarks." What, couldn't he have cited a more damning one? There are countless silly mistakes, including the date of Theodore and Barbara Olson's wedding, and many innuendoes, such as the (unsupported) suggestion that it is Richard Mellon Scaife who has committed not one but two murders. In his coarse attack on Juanita Broaddrick, whose allegation of rape was supported by several contemporaneous witnesses and has not yet been denied by Clinton himself, Brock does not even do the elementary work of stating the case he is trying to rebut. Instead, he inserts a completely gratuitous slander against a decent woman, all of whose independent assertions have survived meticulous fact-checking. The defamation game is still all that this creep knows. Etiquette requires that I mention a very rude description of myself, concentrating on the grossly physical, which includes the assertion that I am unwashed as well as unkempt. Those who know me will confirm that while I may not be tidy, I am so clean you could eat your dinner off me. Perhaps I did not want to put Mr. Brock to the labor of proving this. At any rate, I am relieved to find I am not his type. However, I forgive him this sophomoric passage because its empty hatred was so obviously feigned after the event, and because it describes me as five years younger than I am.
Still, I wanted to take an extra shower after trudging through this dismally written, pick-nose, spiteful and furtive little book. It glitters with malice and the more cowardly kind of "disclosure"; it's a dank, filthy tissue turned inside out. And it is all written allegedly as a defense of the Clintons' right to privacy! As someone who despised Clinton from the very first, I remember resenting the damage done by hysterical and fabricated right-wing attacks, which bought him time and sympathy. Anyone really interested in this period should grab the paperback version of Michael Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton, a verifiable story told by a serious journalist, who began by disbelieving the rumors and discovered by honest exertion that many of them, and some that had not even been suspected, were true.

That's Hitchens at his best, simultaneously freaking hilarious and insightful.

B

peragro · #**183** 10-05-2007, 02:40 PM

Hmmm, not defending Brock. Where's the scratching head smily when you need him?

Quote:

Originally Posted by JollyRoger

As I have stated, one must read Brock's book to understand the point of his website. It is his belief that there is indeed a vast right wing media conspiracy, which he claims he has knowledge of because he was in fact part of it. He has dedicated himself to exposing this conspiracy, which he says works by establishing falsehood as truth by a rather systematic dissemination of false information into the national media stream, of which Mr.Limbaugh is a decided kingpin. He has become so effective at this effort that the outcry on his very existence has become vitriolic on the right, an odd state against a man who was once one of their own, or perhaps because of it.

Botnst · #**184** 10-05-2007, 02:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by peragro

Hmmm, not defending Brock. Where's the scratching head smily when you need him?

Hidden under an open, foetid canard of neocon.

B

peragro · #**185** 10-05-2007, 02:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Botnst

That's Hitchens at his best, simultaneously freaking hilarious and insightful.

B

I agree. I don't always agree with what he has to say but he writes beautifully. He also does a very good job of summing up the subject of his essay by providing excellent sourcing and factual matter to back his claims. That he's a neo-con is a new one on me.

Botnst · #**186** 10-05-2007, 02:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by peragro

I agree. I don't always agree with what he has to say but he writes beautifully. He also does a very good job of summing up the subject of his essay by providing excellent sourcing and factual matter to back his claims. That he's a neo-con is a new one on me.

Everybody who supports the POLICY in Iraq and the GWT is, according to lobotomized folks who specialize in disparaging categorization and easy dismissal, a neocon.

B

peragro · #**187** 10-05-2007, 03:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Botnst

Everybody who supports the POLICY in Iraq and the GWT is, according to lobotomized folks who specialize in disparaging categorization and easy dismissal, a neocon.

B

Isn't that kind of like being called a Jew because you might have defended Israel's right to exist at some point?

Botnst · #**188** 10-05-2007, 03:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by peragro

Isn't that kind of like being called a Jew because you might have defended Israel's right to exist at some point?

Oh gawd, I'm a neocon Jew!

Hitchens is probably a neocon Palestinian terrorist, since he supports Palestinian rights.

peragro · #**189** 10-05-2007, 03:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Botnst

Oh gawd, I'm a neocon Jew!

Hitchens is probably a neocon Palestinian terrorist, since he supports Palestinian rights.

You mean Godless Neocon Palestinian Terrorist Bush-lover (since he shot down quite readily the silliness that was the Plame Affair)

Botnst · #**190** 10-05-2007, 03:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by peragro

You mean Godless Neocon Palestinian Terrorist Bush-lover (since he shot down quite readily the silliness that was the Plame Affair)

Forgot that.

Yep.

B

Honus · #**191** 10-05-2007, 03:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by peragro

You mean Godless Neocon Palestinian Terrorist Bush-lover (since he shot down quite readily the silliness that was the Plame Affair)

I'm guessing that the number of people whose opinion of the Plame affair was changed by Hitchens equals exactly zero. People who thought that the political exploitation of a CIA agent was silly found Hitchens most persuasive. People who respect the traditional separation between partisan politics and national security were probably not persuaded much at all by what he wrote.

Botnst · #**192** 10-05-2007, 03:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dculkin

...People who respect the traditional separation between partisan politics and national security were probably not persuaded much at all by what he wrote.

Gosh, was that naive virgin in Washington? Is he still there and still a virgin?

peragro · #**193** 10-05-2007, 03:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dculkin

I'm guessing that the number of people whose opinion of the Plame affair was changed by Hitchens equals exactly zero. People who thought that the political exploitation of a CIA agent was silly found Hitchens most persuasive. People who respect the traditional separation between partisan politics and national security were probably not persuaded much at all by what he wrote.

Right,

That whole Plame Affair was really something other than a huge waste of time and effort and money.

Gee, kinda like the latest round of "Political Gotcha Back" except we haven't sent huge sums of money down the toilet - yet.

peragro · #**194** 10-05-2007, 03:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Botnst

Gosh, was that naive virgin in Washington? Is he still there and still a virgin?

You are being insensitive. That virgin could be a she.

cmac2012 · #**195** 10-05-2007, 06:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by peragro

betray, sell

[I]deliver to an enemy by treachery; "Judas sold Jesus"; "The spy betrayed his country"

. . . . . and so on, ad naseum. I see that Move-on.org has joined the large bundle of albatrosses I will be forever obliged to carry around, hanging from my neck. Along with Clinton, Kerry, M. Moore, Rather, (where to stop?)

Their words were very poorly chosen. The point is, the did not judge his testimony to be anything other than Bush admin. gospel.