Last Call
Pleszczynski, Wladyslaw
"LAST CALL" By Wladyslaw Pleszczynski You've Got A Friend, American Spectator is Back! "You don't have to take my word for it, because the headline wasn't mine but rather that of the liberal...
...Now many things can be said about this salvo, and I promise to say them, but I must begin by expressing disappointment at MWO's inability to toe the party line it established when it became America's leading defender of and apologist for David Brock and his recent attack memoir, Blinded by the Right...
...The good news:Think of all the MWO-worthy material.The bad news:Think of all the MWO-worthy material...
...Like all true lefties, they talk big but hide in anonymity...
...You don't have to take my word for it, because the headline wasn't mine but rather that of the liberal left's favorite website, Media-WhoresOnline.com (which the dainty James Carville always seems to refer to as Media Horses...
...Even fanatical liberals like Molly Ivins, when not denouncing Clarence Thomas' alleged taste for centerfolds while winking at Bill Clinton's consensualism, have expressed distaste for Brock's gratuitous betrayal of his former friends...
...When Brock's subtext makes it clear Clinton had no sex life...
...What's more, it's so Washington to call everyone a friend, so conventional and bourgeois, so unimaginatively unleftwing...
...His memoir was published by Crown, which it turns out has now published Coulter's new book, Slander: Liberal Lies About theAlnerican Right.Talk about checkbook journalism.Will David now break with his own publisher...
...How can they call me that, lead me on, when no one knows who MWO comprises...
...That Brock could be one sick puppy came to mind this spring when it was reported he had checked into a psychiatric ward last summer...
...Long before it might have been fashionable, he was a close pal ofAnn Coulter's, whom he now slanders as an anti-Semite...
...Unless maybe in the case of Juanita Broaddrick, where Brock's assignment was to attack the idea she was raped...
...Predictably, the comrades of the MWO denounced these reports as invasions of privacy and hysterically compared Brock's plight to the great Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky's when he was locked up in a psycho ward by the KGB (at a time when MWO's forerunners would have all sided with the KGB...
...It's the book party for his best-seller The Real Anita Hill...
...LAST CALL By Wladyslaw Pleszczynski You've Got A Friend G ' merican Spectator is Back...
...Don't they worry about losing their edge...
...Below it, MWO, as the site likes to refer to itself—the middle word of the full title being more often applied to the proprietors themselves, rather than their insufficiently left-wing targets—added two paragraphs of choice commentary...
...Then there's that hurtful reference to me as MWO's "friend...
...In another he has hopped onto the desk of our assistant publisher and is playfully rearranging the seating for our upcoming annual dinner—or maybe it was for the special tribute to Ben Stein when Ben turned 50, at which David placed his boyfriend at a table behind his, while he made sure to be seated with Laura Ingraham...
...But on top of every-thing else, it didn't dawn on them that if anyone was anybody's friend, we at the Spectator were David Brock's friend, and he was ours...
...There was real kindness in his eyes...
...In them David is usually smiling and clearly happy, not a condition of being that cause easily to him...
...These guys are regular First Amendment chillers...
...A few scenes from happier days always come to mind...
...David loved the political fray...
...But at least the opening paragraph was marginally wittier, if still a terrible imitation of classic Spectatorese: Howard "Mistah" Kurtz reports that our friend Wlady Pleszczynski and Partner in Slime R. Emmett Tyrrell plan to relaunch the New Old American Spectacle, the Scaifeoid scandal sheet whose claims to fame are stories written by David Brock, who now says his work for the Spectacle was produced back in the day when he was a member in good standing of the Cult of the Soulless, consumed with the fame and fortune that accompanies writing about President Clinton's sex life...
...But those who once thought of Brock as a friend could only wonder what kind of new friends, if any, he now had...
...But with a few exceptions, the right hasn't swallowed the bait precisely because there's no reason to argue on the left's terms and explain when we stopped beating our wife.A book written in bad faith disqualifies itself...
...Much has been made on MWO and other knee-jerk pro-Clintonite sites such as The American Prospect Online of the right's unwillingness to give serious attention to Brock's book...
...In one he's at the Fairfax Hotel...
...when the screen showed Senator Phil Gramm on the Senate floor laying into Hillary's health care scheme...
...Once he described running into Bob Woodward, who complimented him.With some amusement David participated in a fashion shoot for New York magazine, appearing in an expensive dark-blue, double-breasted suit along with such trendy figures as ABC's Cokie Roberts and high-powered Moynihan aide Lawrence O'Donnell...
...They've almost Wladyslaw Pleszczynski is executive editor of The American Spectator...
...82 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002pleaded for conservative reviews, clearly a first in American journalistic history...
...I mention her in part because of David's now chronic attacks on the right for practicing "checkbook journalism," even though he's the only journalist I know who could afford to own a home in Georgetown and a beach house in Delaware...
...A former friend would like to know...
...He also enjoyed the recognition he'd earned...
...I didn't want to depress him, but I always thought he looked better in dark green...
...One evening he came into my office to watch McNeil-Lehrer and pumped his fist and exclaimed"Yes...
...It linked to a Washington Post item in June about our magazine's return to Tyrrellian editorial control...
...Yes, hurtful...
...The second one read: This is both good news and bad news for MWO and our readers...
...So what's up with its acknowledgment of "President Clinton's sex life...
...He's as warm, sweet and grateful as I've ever seen him...
Vol. 35 • July 2002 • No. 4
