DAVID BROCK'S HOBSON'S CHOICE
David Brock's Hobson's Choice Irascible gumshoe Gary Al-drich was in the news again this week, when New Yorker writer Jane Mayer quoted the former FBI agent and bestselling author as saying that...
...These people have way too much time on their hands...
...This will be followed by a "Guided Meditation on Interconnectedness," and then a dinner to discuss "The Sweep and Future of Human Civilization...
...If not soon, when...
...So Brock would clearly— But wait: Mayer co-wrote (with onetime Wall Street Journal colleague Jill Abramson) one of the most negative (and in Brock's view, dishonest and self-interested) reviews of his account of the Hill-Thomas affair, The Real Anita Hill...
...it flourishes...
...Aldrich denied it and threatened to sue—probably ill-advis-edly, since Aldrich himself told Newsweek last year that many of his stories were "only allegations that needed to be further investigated...
...One blind visitor explained to the Post: "The dots are about five times normal size...
...David Brock's Hobson's Choice Irascible gumshoe Gary Al-drich was in the news again this week, when New Yorker writer Jane Mayer quoted the former FBI agent and bestselling author as saying that some of the allegations he made about President Clinton in Unlimited Access were "hypothetical" and "not quite solid...
...16, 1995, issue, drew such heavy hitters as George P. Shultz and Jane Fonda, Zbigniew Brzezinski and John Denver, Ted Turner and (needless to say) Shirley MacLain...
...It imposed sanctions on five Chinese citizens and three minor Chinese companies for the next 12 months—depriving them of about $2 million in business with the United States...
...Touch Me Not Two weeks ago, our reporter Pia Catton gave a number of reasons for disliking the new memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, starting with its misrepresentation of the man's character and his politics...
...It's Mayer by a (held) nose...
...Regnery [Aldrich's publisher] and the conservative media outlets that embraced the book," Brock told the Washington Post, "are going to have to give the public an explanation or an apology...
...As a Washington Post headline last week put it: "FDR Memorial's Braille Lettering Is Too Large to Be Legible...
...In other words, you Braille-readers should grow yourselves some bigger fingers...
...Brock promptly denounced Aldrich, countering that he had merely asked Aldrich about the story during an interview...
...And with this action, the administration avoided sanctioning any large state entity (because "we have no evidence that the Chinese government was involved...
...Georgia's own Newt Gingrich, whom the program lists as a dinner keynote speaker, divagating on "Priorities for U.S...
...Jesse Jackson, sure, but Lynne Cheney...
...When Mayer and Abram-son wrote their own Hill-Thomas book, Strange Justice, Brock replied in the American Spectator with a devastating catalogue of factual errors that stretched to 22,000 words...
...The Clinton administration took no action against broader Chinese industry groups or the Beijing government and continued to warn Congress against revoking China's most-favored-nation status...
...The first Forum, chronicled in our Oct...
...We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time," a senior State Department official explained...
...Rob Reiner and George Gilder...
...Then the administration plans to approve billions of dollars of Westing-house and Bechtel nuclear-reactor sales to China...
...Big Think Revisited The state of the State of the World Forum is good, we are delighted to report...
...And—holy smokes...
...The Mayer-Aldrich spat presented a problem of allegiance for conservative investigative journalist David Brock...
...All in a day's work...
...Nothing is life-size in the piece, so you very much have to adjust yourself to the scale...
...And if not us, who...
...We all know that Newt is engaging in vigorous outreach these days, but we hope he'll draw the line somewhere...
...So whom to believe when liars call liars liars...
...How will they justify this...
...Cutting off MFN would be counterproductive...
...Last summer, Aldrich revealed Brock as the source for his most controversial "allegation": that President Clinton had sneaked out of the White House for a tryst, hidden in the back of a station wagon...
...Needless to say, the Clinton administration ignored Chinese chemical-weapons proliferation until the Chemical Weapons Convention (which China signed) could be squeaked by the Senate...
...The point of this latest announcement was to make the White House look tough on Chinese proliferation without doing any damage to the Clinton administration's favorite trading partner...
...Clinton's Wimpy Sanctions Last week, after four years of repeated Chinese sales of chemical-weapons components to Iran, the White House finally acted...
...After all, Beijing must be rewarded...
...But wait until the MFN debate is over...
...it thrives...
...You may recall that the Forum is the project of New Age gadfly James Garrison and the otherwise unemployed Mikhail Gorbachev, who hope to create a "global brain trust...
...Here's another reason: Besides memorializing ineptly, it panders ineptly...
...Looking through the program prospectus, we were most struck by the list of invited participants...
...Another, after fruitlessly running his fingers over the bas-relief, said, "It must be a fake...
...We are told he has declined...
...The problem...
...It's a giant wonkathon, in other words, for the pompous and the privileged—the flotsam of the international celebrity-intellectual swamp...
...You sort of expect Alan Cranston and Marian Wright Edelman, but Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation...
...The result was an exchange of heated accusations of mendacity and some bizarre hate-mail from the pen of Aldrich...
...They're planning to say that the sale will keep China from selling other, more dangerous weapons components to Iran...
...In an effort to placate advocates for the disabled, upset that FDR would not be depicted in his wheelchair, the memorial incorporated Braille in one of its sculptures, spelling out for the blind to feel the alphabet soup of New Deal agencies—WPA, CCC, and so on...
...Foreign Policy...
...For three days each year, they "deliberate together concerning the great issues pertaining to the future of humanity...
...This year's Forum—to be held this fall, as always and where else, in San Francisco—will begin with "A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us," which the program describes as "a mile-long walk (one foot for each million years of time) to highlight the major events and themes of the evolution of life on earth...
...As always with such blunders, the most entertaining part of the story was the sculptor's effort to avoid saying he had goofed: "My concept of that piece," said Robert Graham, "was to have Braille as a kind of invitation to touch, more than anything...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 37
