The Nutty-Slutty Spectator / Atlas Shrugged

...He wants to debate conservatives, and in a contentious paper that he also sent to Mr...

...Caryn James and Dinitia Smith have limited themselves to one use each...

...Goodman now erroneously says the phrase is found in the book, while Ivins risked censure by Dr...

...On February 12, the Times Sunday magazine ran a sniveling, resignation-filled 8,000-word profile of Wladyslaw Pleszczynski is managing editor of The American Spectator...

...Everyone is declaring war and using precisely that phrase: 'declare war.' " As he explained, "Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition have declared war on the larger culture," Jerry Falwell has "declare[d] war on the anti-Christians among us," Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray "have declared war both on the poor and on social reform," and Indianapolis's own Hudson Institute "has declared war on those who do not share its conservative ideology...

...Irked by Brock's successes on other fronts, Goodman and Ivins have joined Frank Rich and Anthony Lewis as repeat offenders...

...As Hilton Kramer noted in his New York Post column the following Tuesday, the article made no effort to discuss, let alone confront, the ideas of these conservatives...

...CI 78 The American Spectator April 1995...

...Whereupon it was taken up by the likes of Ellen Goodman, Molly Ivins, Michael Kinsley, National Public Radio, even Howard Kurtz (who used it twice in one piece, and in the wake of Troopergate seemed to attribute it to Bob Tyrrell, as did Esquire magazine unambiguously), not to mention all those people at the New York Times...

...There is a conservative tenor of this age that is depressing the sense of progress," he said...

...Bracey for calling Brock "that foul little right-wing reporter...

...A bigger problem than the Times's own lack of civility, though, was that the piece was all lifestyles and personalities...

...An apologist for Jimmy Carter has used it...

...Journalists as far away as Dublin, Glasgow, and London have cited it...

...Blood-drenched and shell-shocked, he issued this final plea: "An age that welcomes innovations requires more optimism and civility...

...0 f course, when's the last time the liberal opinion elite ever betrayed an interest in somebody else's work...

...youngish conservatives it variously described as the new conservative "opinion elite" or the "counter counterculture" ("Now they're an establishment themselves—conservative, connected and comfortably elite...

...Only one journalist got it right, the Washington Times's John Elvin, who thought it a fair question in view of the flurry of Hill-related facts reported by Brock—which I might add no one has yet refuted, or even attempted to refute...

...Owen, he challenges the ideas and arguments of such professional and ideological foes as Chester Finn, Diane Ravitch, and Denis Doyle...

...The tone throughout was catty yet cowardly—the magazine relied on at least five pages of unflattering photographs (plus the cover) to land the low blows it lacked the guts to deliver in words, though even here it couldn't resist throwing a sucker punch after the bell, describing one conservative late in the piece as "stout, prematurely balding, tieless and perspiring...

...Never, ever has any of these geniuses confessed to any greater familiarity with Brock's work on Hill...

...Such hopeless reliance on liberal clichés notwithstanding, at least Bracey seems determined to defend his honor...

...The first Timesman to attack Brock's treatment of Anita Hill, Anna Quindlen, isn't on this list—but that's only because the words hadn't been fed to her at the time of her attack on Brock...

...THE NUTTY-SLUTTY SPECTATOR Atlas Shrugged by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski F rom Bloomington our Indiana editor Kent Owen has sent me a speech by educationist Gerald W. Bracey, Ph.D., delivered last fall when Bracey became the first "Distinguished Fellow" of that town's Agency for Instructional Technology...

...Bracey is pleased that computers are finally beginning to make a positive contribution to what he calls active learning, but he is troubled by something bigger...

...I knew what was coming eight lines into the Times piece when David Brock, its leading man, was introduced as the one who had described Anita Hill as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty"—which is about all the liberal world cares to know about Brock's original March 1992 American Spectator article on Anita Hill that a year later was followed by Brock's bestseller The Real Anita Hill...

...These are mean times...

...By my count, the Times has now linked Brock with the phrase eight times (though previously the actual words were more properly cited as "a bit nutty, and a bit slutty...

...A nd what did Brock actually write in that original story: "So Hill may be a bit nutty, and a bit slutty, but is she an outright liar...

...That's not the sort of engagement you get from the folks at the New York Times...

...Frank Rich has used it in each of the three columns he's written about Brock, beating out Anthony Lewis, who inexplicably left it out of one of his three attacks on Brock since 1993...

...The nutty-slutty phrase was first reported by the Washington Post's magazine columnist Charles Trueheart on February 25, 1992, but it required Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson's sandbagging of Brock's book in the New Yorker fifteen months later to give it everlasting life...