THE RIGHT, THEY'VE GOT NASTINESS CORNERED :

True Confessions : a review of Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock (Jane Mayer, June 27, 2002, The New York Review of Books)

In March of 1992, a sensational investigative report by an unknown journalist was published in a little-read magazine. Though it wasn't clear at the time, David Brock's article, "The Real Anita Hill," which appeared in the American Spectator, marked the beginning of one of the nastiest decades in American political history.

Okay, at the urging of Tapped, I had every intention of reading this review. This despite the fact that both of the books that I've read by Jane Mayer--Landslide : The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 and Strange Justice : The Selling of Clarence Thomas--and her Linda Tripp expose for The New Yorker, were absurdly partisan and paranoid Lefty hatchet jobs, not unlike those Brock used to be paid to be paid to write for the lunatic Right. But the above is the first sentence of her review and I defy anyone who was conscious during the second half of the 20th Century to read that line without laughing aloud.

We'll set aside McCarthyism, the struggle between civil rights activists and segregationists, Vietnam, Watergate, Central America, the Bork hearings, etc. We'll even grant her, for the sake of argument, that the 1990s were especially nasty. But how, in the name of all that's holy, can you claim that the nastiness of the '90s begins with the expose of Anita Hill, rather than with the testimony of Anita Hill?

Let's recall, after all, that the entirety of Ms Hill's brief against Mr. Thomas was that he asked her out, admired her endowment, asked if she'd seen a particular porn flick, and quoted The Exorcist to the effect that there was a pubic hair on his Coke can (a pickup line that I've always found surprisingly ineffective). He never touched her. Never threatened her. Never retaliated against her. In fact, he wrote her recommendations and helped her find new positions. If everything she said is true it would leave us with a diminished impression of Mr. Thomas's manners and no reason whatsoever to believe he's unfit for the bench. Yet she, despite the help he had provided, participated in an attempt by liberal special interest groups to derail his nomination.

Still, Ms Mayer would have us believe that the nastiness began only when Ms Hill's own background became an issue the next year? This is self-pitying Left victimology at its most repellant.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 6, 2002 7:18 PM