Editorials / The Worst Book of the Year/David and the Goliaths
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
• EDITORIALS The Worst Book of the Year by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. t is that joyous time of year when I / and my colleagues on the J. Gordon Coogler Committee confer the Coogler laurels upon the...
...Years of reading bad books suggested that she would turn out true drivel, drivel beyond anything any other university professor might exhale...
...Its prose is what we have come to expect from the modern law school...
...t is that joyous time of year when I / and my colleagues on the J. Gordon Coogler Committee confer the Coogler laurels upon the author of that degenerate literary work that we adjudge the Worst Book of the Year...
...Brock's report is about the same story that two fine reporters at the Los Angeles Times finally published two days after Brock and CNN broke it...
...It is a charge that echoes through the Whitewatergate reports...
...I suppose they think that by reviling Brock they will scare all other American journalists away from their patrons...
...Only Words's argumentation is specious and sophomoric...
...Journalists and citizens concerned by the corruption of American life can thank David Brock for its liberating effect...
...Thus, thirty-five years ago, when the barriers against pornography withered, sophists very much like MacKinnon were arguing that the word "obscenity" had no common meaning, that what was pornography for thee was literature for me, that some dirty-necked sexual deviant scribbling about excrement played the same role as Shakespeare writing The Merry Wives of Windsor...
...Professor MacKinnon is very much opposed to rape, which she believes makes her unique...
...1 David and the Goliaths I t is an amazing spectacle...
...That is clear from her stupid book...
...Another feminist law school prof has heaved up a semi-literate tract, and all the judges rushed to it...
...Does this sound like "tabloid fare" to you...
...The tradition teaches that words have no general meaning...
...Only then do we get into steamy testimony regarding the sex lives of the Clintons, and charges of Hillary Clinton ordering the destruction of records...
...Yet they continue to tut-tut at David Brock and to utter dark threats...
...To enter into debate with such a fraud is to enter into her fantasyland...
...Reading them all takes a vast amount of time...
...They are going to fail...
...Brock's piece begins by describing past presidents' sexual misbehavior and the attendant political coercion that always follows such promiscuity, making it a serious threat to the commonweal...
...She would eagerly have writers jailed for writing what she says is pornography...
...think of Robert Coover, author of The Public Burning and Coogler laureate for 1977...
...Brock never said President Clinton offered this trooper a job "for silence" as the affidavit states, but rather for information on the other troopers...
...We have not been disappointed...
...Next he introduces the troopers, acknowledges their possible motives—noble and ignoble—and details their responsibilities and access to the Clintons even after the election...
...As for whatshe might adjudge pornography, it might be anything...
...As the multiplying headlines about Whitewatergate and the Madison bank bust make clear, increasing numbers of inquisitive journalists are unearthing vast financial and political corruption in their wake...
...Does Paul Duke know somethingabout these troopers that other Americans do not, or has the TV commentator again failed to read that which he jabbers about...
...If a bad word is a bad deed, then a good word is a good deed, so the honored axiom that "actions speak louder than words" is extinct...
...Why are the vilifiers of David Brock not hissing at CNN and the Los Angeles Times...
...Generally the award is conferred a couple of months into the new year, for in this era of widespread higher education a stupendous number of very bad books are published...
...The First Amendment shall be abbreviated...
...Later, when more evidence isavailable, historians can affirm journalists' accuracy, as they surely will with Brock's work on Hill and the Clintons...
...Actually, it is probably the most devastating revelation of a sitting president's past corruptions ever published...
...She is also opposed to pornography, another position she assumes to be controversial...
...Professor Catharine MacKinnon, the screaming jewel of the University of Michigan Law School, has won the Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...No longer do we need to help an old lady across the street...
...He is free to do what investigative journalists are supposed to do, namely, establish the truth of a news story by corroboration and verification of the evidence at hand...
...Next Brock discusses the new morality that, fairly or unfairly, sank other public figures, e.g., John Tower, Robert Packwood, and Gary Hart...
...Now there is a word we in the age of feminist rant rarely see...
...She and her boyfriend have publicly threatened the reviewer, the boyfriend writing, "If there is ever anything I can do to hurt your career, I will do it...
...He then describes abuses of power, and the heavy-handed threats of Clinton henchman Buddy Young, the troopers' former boss, who claimed to Brock not to be in contact with the White House and then was filmed by ABC conferring with White House aide Bruce Lindsey...
...And are the charges of Clinton's security detail "old stories...
...MacKinnon is, aside from being a faulty thinker and preposterous writer, a bully...
...One of the most liberating writers in American journalism continues to be vilified, mainly by journalists, for writing bold and accurate journalism...
...Nonetheless the bought journalists target Brock...
...La MacKinnon believes that words are deeds...
...They are wasting their spitballs...
...She has already accused the man who reviewed her book unfavorably in the Nation of raping her by his review...
...Let us hope la MacKinnon accepts her Coogler award for the Worst Book of the Year as a compliment...
...What makes Brock a marvel among journalists is that he does not care what others think, and he does not have to...
...This is such a dreadful book that I shall not be surprised if it also wins a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award...
...Yet she comes from the same philosophical tradition that has allowed pornography to become such a widespread nuisance, and inasmuch as pornography might encourage rape she comes from the philosophical tradition that allowed the increased incidence of rape...
...It means the hatred of men...
...This year our job was easy...
...But a word is not a deed...
...The bought journalists may soon be out of work...
...Newsweek columnist Joe Klein says, "The story is trash," and innocently asks, "Where are all the women...
...They will tell us what are good and usable words and what are the words that will land us in court...
...His next section profiles Clinton: a quick study, hard-working, once-radical, now eager to please—all very interesting and not entirely unflattering...
...In fact, it is la MacKinnon's philosophical tradi20 The American Spectator February 1994 tion that lectures us against the existence of sexual deviants...
...Her book is Only Words, another feminist sally into misandry...
...Rather than work in one of the gigantic bureaucracies of our media where advancement comes with flattering some highly politicized and otherwise craven editor, Brock writes for small, independent journals...
...Brock is the journalist who revealed Anita Hill's testimony for the salad of falsehoods and contradictions that it is...
...Bad words are the same as baddeeds...
...My fellow journalists, continue your work...
...After Brock's boldness it is going to be ever more difficult for editors and publishers to muzzle diligent reporters...
...In fact, reading merely one or two can be time-consuming...
...Now it is sufficient to sit by the curb uttering pious thoughts as the poor lady inches her way through the traffic...
...Brock demonstrates how Clinton has manipulated the media, for instance, his deceits on "Sixty Minutes...
...I do not want my career cut short...
...Its data are dubious when not arrantly bogus...
...The Clintons are singularly corrupt...
...New York Times columnist Frank Rich says of the troopers' testimony regarding Clinton's serial sex, "If true, [the charges] would make the president seem all too pathetically ordinary...
...You know how "ordinary" it is to maintain half a dozen sexual partners and to arrange yet more one-night stands...
...It is based on troopers' testimony that has yet to be refuted by the Clintons (who have carefully avoided denying the charges) or by other troopers—one of whom bowed to Clinton adviser Betsey Wright's importunities to depose but not sign an affidavit denying a charge that Brock never raised...
...One of the problems with denying the general meaning of words is that bullies can then dominate discourse...
...Actually Brock's 11,000-word piece is argued on a very high intellectual plane...
...Ipso facto, bad words should be treated as bad deeds, which is to say punishable by law...
...Surely her scholarly efforts would be a mess upon the page...
...You know how many women eagerly step forward and admit to adultery...
...TV commentator Paul Duke calls David Brock one of the year's "losers," who "wrote that slimy magazine article that revived all those old charges about Bill Clinton's personal behavior...
...Admittedly his vilifiers are the bought journalists of the social-climbing variety, whose party-line prose has made American journalism dubious to millions of Americans...
...As for Brock's writing, it is alive with vivid detail and careful analysis that leaves his detractors looking like naffs or simple propagandists...
...Some are sleep-inducing (particularly those written by the so-called professoriate) and others can leave the reader nauseated (I have in mind the dreadful stuff written by that ghastly lit set babied and cosseted at one of the Republic's idiotic writers workshops...
...And its theses are nonsensical and often mischievous to the Bill of Rights, the rule of law, and a happy sex life...
...0 22 The American Spectator February 1994...
...1993 Coogler Award for the Worst Book of the Year...
...He is now the journalist who broke the story of the Clintons' repeated abuse of power, their continued lies to the electorate and to the press, their dissimulati6ns regarding the suicide of the highest-level federal official since James Forrestal, and Bill Clinton's satyriasis...
...Brock's charge remains unrefuted...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
