Public Nuisances
Tyrrell, R. Emmett
"Public Nuisances" The Conscience of a Self-Confessed Fraud —WASHINGTON y literary reputation is made! The Neu'Ybrker magazine has likened me to a member of the Communist Party U.S.A. You might remember that...
...What about their compassion or their readiness to champion the underdog...
...Krugman and pundit William Kristol, to name but two...
...Brock's fraud begins in his book's title, in the phrase The Conscience of . . . So replete is his book with fabrication that Brock obviously has no conscience...
...He is the first member of this rising literary movement to draw attention to his arty technique...
...From the literary plateau of the Carter White House, Hertzberg has vaulted from literary Himalaya to literary Himalaya, and now at The New Yorker he is touting Brock as heir to Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon, and a writer in the vanguard of the anti-Communist literary movements of the 1940s...
...He is under investigation even now for two more alleged rapes...
...The piece is a concoction of Brock's literary art...
...Perhaps they are following the Krugman tactic of heaping contempt on Enron to prove their own probity...
...Simpson is starring in a documentary of his life...
...Had Hertzberg asked Olson before publishing this balderdash, Olson would have told him, as he has said repeatedly of Brock's claim, that as a lawyer it was not his responsibility to interfere with or second-guess the editorial judgment of the Spectator's editors...
...Naturally the American people thought he was lying and did not vote for him in 1980...
...Who among the bigmouth pundits will stand up and say "Wait a minute...
...Perhaps Hertzberg aspires to become the New Charlatan's Professor Lionel Trilling...
...Is it possible that the country's other pundits have also been on the take...
...The Conscience of a Self-Confessed Fraud —WASHINGTON y literary reputation is made...
...Now Mr...
...For instance, he claims that The American Spectator's "Troopergate" story (which along with a Los Angeles Times story quoted Governor Bill Clinton's body-guards as having pimped for the governor) is now "discredited" This weasel word may mean many things, but "discredited" does not mean refuted...
...And Condit is, well, he is a politician who now uses Clinton's tactics to remain in Congress...
...though at this writing it appears he will be defeated because of the charge, which is in fact very serious...
...Boys Will Be Boys But This Is Getting Eerie —WASHINGTON 11 Washington is convulsed in debate over whether pugilist Mike Tyson should be allowed to perform in this famous city...
...I do not have any answers...
...It is just a matter of the conservatives' waiting until Enron's plight becomes absolutely hopeless...
...The American Spectator never claimed Foster was murdered and eventually lost the financial support of a major donor for ridiculing a book that argued that Foster was murdered...
...Tyson is possibly the most controversial of all heavyweight champions, having spent three years in the calaboose for sexual assault and yet another year for roadrage assault...
...His next rave review will be for Doris Kearns Goodwin whose plagiarisms have stirred the country...
...Give the guys a break...
...It is not just that after years of run-ins with the law—usually involving the abuse of women—he remains in the public eye, free to erupt at any time...
...This is a perfect time for the brusque, beefy, no-nonsense Jack Germond to prove his stuff or for The Washington Post's Richard Cohen once again to display his talent for "independence...
...electing, instead, Ronald Reagan, a man whom Hertzberg and the other Carterites will still tell you was a dreadful failure...
...Whatever happened to our columnists' vaunted iconoclasm...
...MARCH/APRIL 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 81...
...Simpson...
...Surely I am not the first to observe that she is more than a writer of occasional columns...
...I am not kidding...
...Communists were essentially soft-hearted folks or "liberals in a hurry" as the phrase had it...
...Hertzberg's confusions continue...
...Evans-Pritchard's actual piece concludes thus: "It is not the purpose of this article to explain what happened to Vincent Foster on July 20, 1993...
...The most lurid charge against the congressman remains unsubstantiated...
...and he was impeached for perjury and obstruction ofjustice...
...You might remember that not so many years ago, for a writer or actor to be recognized as a communist by The New Yorker was to be recognized as very progressive...
...Hertzberg, apparently still under Brock's spell, goes on to repeat Brock's equally fictional claim that the present solicitor general of the United States, Ted Olson, wanted PUBLIC N BY R. E M M E' the nonexistent Spectator piece published, telling Brock that the imaginary piece "was a way of turning up the heat on the administration until another scandal was shaken loose, which was the Spectator's mission...
...My sudden literary recognition in the venerable New Yorker comes in an adulatory review of David Brock's new book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative...
...Now, of course, Brock is a self-confessed liar...
...He remains at large after beating one particularly grisly rap and after several other serious displays of violence...
...The infallible Washington Times reports that a fight between Tyson and the delicious Lennox Lewis could bring the city $150 million in revenue and a much-needed bounce to the tourist business that has fallen off dreadfully since 9/11...
...Hertzberg, writing in his usual spumoni of confusion, is not all that clear as to whether it is he or Brock who has likened me to a Communist, but I am not alone in receiving this gratifying accolade...
...In The New Yorker he seems to be saying that at The American Spectator I commissioned "the story" that White House deputy counsel Vin-cent Foster "had been murdered by or at the behest of the Clintons, who were orchestrating a monstrous cover-up" I never commissioned or published such a story...
...At least I thought I saw such a piece written by him some time ago in, I believe it was, Fortune...
...80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 ISANCES Y R R E L L, J R. Are they waiting for the intercession of Human Rights Watch...
...I suppose The New York Times' Dismal Science columnist, Paul Krugman, already wrote this piece...
...Doubtless then, Pat Buchanan will heave up a column, perhaps arguing that Enron is a 100 percent American company with a lineage going back to the Mayflower...
...In the case of the former president the charges of abuse of women (one is a rape charge) have not been wholly substantiated...
...Few would argue with the claims that he is a repeated perjurer and obstructer ofjustice...
...Arianna Huffington will see Enron's empty pension funds as examples of"compassionate conservatism...
...Only one other paid advisor has been identified, but there must be more...
...Congressman Gary Condit said that to a New York Times reporter...
...Possibly Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina will expose the rest of them, and that detail about their last name's beginning with K ought to raise the curiosity of the cornpone senator from the Senate Commerce Committee...
...The former president is an amusing fellow, and it is said that he has not done the country much harm...
...The first that comes to mind is O.J...
...Does that explain why not one has come forward with a good word for Enron...
...If you were a writer, it went without saying that you were an exquisite writer and probably a humanitarian and advocate of early child schooling.All that talk about Soviet prison camps and general repression was presumed to be a lot of anti-Communist hysteria...
...Hold it...
...In fact, Clinton's subsequent behavior has only validated "Troopergate's" gravamens that he is a sexual predator and abuser of power...
...Typical of her, it would have the Light Touch...
...Or how about the inimitable Maureen Dowd publishing a playful and girlish column at her venerated site on the op-ed page of The New York Times...
...Surely she could tap out a clever column about the Enron executives' neat haircuts or their membership at posh golf clubs or something about Rodeo Drive...
...I find all that eerie...
...That means nearly half the citizens of the United States are Communists.Who says the Cold War is over...
...But to return to Enron: its executives paid these pundits lavishly...
...Cal Thomas will discover that Enron is a deeply Christian corporation...
...Once out, perhaps those tactics will help him remain a celebrity...
...It is that there are at least three other famous men in the same very public situation, each with his own claim to talent and his own alibis and complaints to being victimized...
...I am a moral and literary colossus...
...Krugman, mind you—that he had received $50,000 for being a member of a mysterious Enron advisory group of pundits, most of whose members we now know have last names that begin with the letter K.There is Mr...
...His indignation against Enron seems to have developed after it was revealed—not by Mr...
...Well, he may be a fine fighter, but there is something eerie about him...
...The other two public men who travel the country with lurid charges filed against them are a former president and an embattled United States congressman...
...The reviewer is Hendrik Hertzberg, who rose to literary prominence many years ago as a poet in President Jimmy Carter's speech-writing stable...
...His New Yorker review likens all conservatives and most Republicans to members of the Communist Party U.S.A...
...So now it is official...
...He stands with Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Michael Bellesiles, winner of the Bancroft Prize for history, and—I would guess—scores of other writers in employing such heretofore uncelebrated literary techniques as plagiarism, fic-titious citations, made-up reportage, and bold fraud...
...Clinton is a celebrity—admired here, booed there—all await his next scandal...
...Jimmy is the fellow who campaigned on the slogan, "If I ever lie to you don't vote for me" He presided over an administration that saw American inter-national prestige and American economic vitality sink to a post-World War II nadir while he transformed the presidency into a soap box...
...In fact, he is a self-confessed fraud...
...Or is she working some other angle these days...
...He was, however, been found guilty of contempt of court...
...Krug-man is leading the lynch mob against his former Enron heroes...
...We Reds may win yet...
...It would bring in all manner of knowing detail about the typical Enron executive's lifestyle, his wife's lifestyle, his pedicurist's lifestyle or that of his highly pedigreed dog...
...she is a sociologist-like Flaubert...
...Yuppies, you have nothing to lose but your chains" There is more confused writing in Hertzberg's testimonial that touches upon me personally...
...Well, it is all very disappointing...
...he boasts of having published fraudulent claims about Clarence Thomas...
...As I say, the continued presence of these men in public life strikes me as eerie.Tyson may be champion of the world again...
...His perjury, obstruction of justice, contempt of court, and abuse of the pardoning power came later...
...Surely, those woebegone Enron execs trooping up to Capitol Hill practically in chains are underdogs...
...It would be another of Miss Dowd's "Makes-you-think" pieces...
...Calling All Pundits: Enron Alert —WASHINGTON s there not anyone out there among America's famously outspoken pundits willing to utter a kind word for Enron...
...Some just say the claims do not matter...
...Or if not compassion, how about one of their famous "contrarian" pieces arguing that, contrary to received opinion, Enron was actually a brilliantly conceived modern corporation, very progressive and—what would they call it?—New Democrat...
...Feminists call him a "sexual predator" and want him banned from the fight game.Yet fight fans want to see him in the ring...
...Both he and Hertzberg are misrepresenting a 1995 review by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report on Foster's death...
...Doubtless, as time goes on, some of my conservative colleagues will leap to Enron's defense...
...In our day Brock himself is in the vanguard of our era's cutting-edge literary movement...
...He has, however, served as a role model for some very unsavory figures: for instance the congressman, who has torn a page from the ex-president's game book and now claims that one of the best reasons for re-electing him is that it will help criminal investigators maintain public interest in the whereabouts of Chandra Levy's body...
Vol. 35 • March 2002 • No. 2
