David Brock: Mr. Right, Mr. Right Now, or Boogie Man?

[CENTER][SIZE=4]David Brock: Mr. Right, Mr. Right Now, or Boogie Man?[/SIZE]
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Reading between the lines of the wikipedia article about David Brock, excerpted below, raises Oh! so many questions--and red flags (no pun intended). For example, the article dubs someone so connected to the Clintons as the most influential operative in the entire Democratic Party, rather than only as one of the many tools in the Clintons' shed. Also remarkable is describing Brock or any of the entities that he runs as "progressive" or "liberal" or "left wing," when his professional life has for years been devoted primarily to the Clintons, who, in turn, have spent much of their political careers taking the Democratic Party rightward.

[QUOTE]David Brock (born November 2, 1962) is an American political operative, author, and commentator who founded the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America.[1] He has been described by Time magazine as "one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party" [2] He had been a journalist during the 1990s[3] who wrote the book The Real Anita Hill and the Troopergate story, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton.

Brock began his career as a right-wing investigative reporter, but in the late 1990s switched sides, aligning himself with the Democratic Party, and in particular with Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2004, he founded Media Matters for America, a non-profit organization that describes itself as a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."[4] He has since also founded super PACs called American Bridge 21st Century and Correct the Record, has become a board member of the super PAC Priorities USA Action, and has been elected chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

The Nation has described Brock as a "conservative journalistic assassin turned progressive empire-builder;"[6] National Review has called him a "right-wing assassin turned left-wing assassin";[7] and Politico has profiled him as a "former right-wing journalist-turned-pro-Clinton crusader."[/QUOTE]

From the excerpt, we also gather as well that Brock is more political than principled: He smeared law professor and attorney, Anita Hill, who claimed to have endured sexual harassment from her employer, now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but championed Paula Jones, a clerk for the state of Arkansas whose lawsuit made a sexual harassment claim against former Governor of Arkansas and then President Bill Clinton. During a relatively recent interview, Brock, now working on behalf of a candidate whose most loyal demographic is older women, rather conveniently expressed regret about having done a hit piece on Hill. If asked, I think he would have said he also regrets having written Troopergate , but media doesn't seem to ask revealing questions of establishment figures. How media merits its First Amendment protection these day is beyond me, but I digress....

Not long after writing Troopergate, Brock accepted an advance of $1 million to write a book about then First Lady Hillary Clinton.

[QUOTE] The expectation was that it would be a takedown in the style of his writings on Anita Hill and Bill Clinton. The project, however, took a different turn, and the resulting book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, proved to be largely sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton. Having received a $1 million advance and a tight one-year deadline from Simon & Schuster's then-conservative-focused Free Press subsidiary, Brock was under tremendous pressure to produce another bestseller. However, the book contained no major scoops. In Blinded by the Right (2002), Brock said that he had reached a turning point: He had thoroughly examined charges against the Clintons, could not find any evidence of wrongdoing and did not want to make any more misleading claims. Brock further said that his former friends in right-wing politics shunned him because Seduction did not adequately attack the Clintons. The National Review proposed another theory: since “no liberal source in the world would talk to Brock,” he could not collect the kind of information he was after. NR also maintained that while writing the book, Brock had been “seduced” by Sidney Blumenthal, a prominent champion and friend of the Clinton circle.[12] A political enemy had alleged Brock "decided he liked the style and corrupt politics of the Clintons."[/QUOTE]

Of course, Clinton email and Foundation scandals have recently placed Blumenthal's name in the news, but, again, I digress....

Brock claims to have been politically liberal until college. I have met people who were Republicans, but who went left politically in college, but I have never met anyone who claims to have entered college a liberal and gone to the political right while in college--and Brock went to Berkeley, no less. However, in order to have this post move on (no pun intended), let's say his conversion version is gospel. Brock's boomeranging back to the left seems to have begun somewhere between Troopergate and turning a wannabe hit piece about Hillary into a 1996 "nothingburger" (his term for the email scandal and F.B.I. investigations). Seriously? Dear reader, does that seem at all plausible to you? How many rightists do you know, or know of, or are able to imagine, who would have been turned left(ish) by either of the Clintons circa 1996?

Of course, the Paula Jones affair (no pun intended) led to the Monica Lewinsky matter (no pun intended), which, in turn, led to to the Clinton impeachment, aka possibly the worst nightmare of a middle school or high school history teacher. I have heard of Democrats who went right because of those things, but not of a Republican, especially a prominent, "investigative" Republican, who was driven left by them. (Riddle me this: What is better than getting a million bucks to write a hit piece about a Clinton? I'm guessing millions of dollars every year in salaries from various Clinton-serving entities, plus indulgent expense accounts and other perqs?) And now, we have the Koch brothers hinting that Hillary may be a better choice for President than Trump? After Donald Trump claimed that Bill Clinton encouraged him to run for President? Seriously? But, again, I digress....

I don't blame necessarily fault Brock for a primary campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination that has been tarnished "tinged" with racial and religious anti-Semitic bigotry. We saw appeals to racial and religious bigotry during the 2008 Hillary primary campaign in which, as far as I know, Brock did not have a leading role. Even the 2016 mainstream media and social media blitzkriegs on "Bernie bros" had their precursors in 2008 attacks on the racially- and misandrically-tinged, "Obama boys." Those themes in the 2016 campaign are therefore "merely" déjà vu vu (sic), albeit on steroids. However, the 2016 false flag tactics make Rove seem unimaginative and timid, including hiring "Hillary supporters" on message boards and social media, Hillary supporters, real and/or hired, pretending to support U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders online, in social media and in mainstream media (and possibly IRL), etc.

I will not claim that Brock "outAtwaters" Lee Atwater, who has been understudied and/or studied by Karl Rove all other political operatives. (Atwater famously or infamously claimed a different kind of conversion as his life was ending, when he apologized for, among other things, the "naked cruelty" of his tactics against then-Democratic Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis.) However, the distastefulness of Hillary's 2016 primary campaign goes well beyond even her 2008 primary campaign, both in quantity and in absence of quality: It is redolent with eau de Brock.

While this is unlikely to cost the Clintons and/or Brock as much as I believe it should, it is very likely costing the Democratic Party, the DNC and its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (now facing the first primary challenge of her Congressional career from Professor Tim Canova). And, after all, wasn't hurting the left the goal of the Kochs and other "big spenders" when they helped Hillary and Bill Clinton, Al From and Will Marshall found the Democratic Leadership Council? And wasn't that also Brock's goal from at least his college days until he began championing the Clintons? Perne in a gyre!




Sources:
Yeats, William Butler, Sailing to Byzantium [url]https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sailing-byzantium[/url]
Facebook post of New Hampshire State Representative Timothy Smith, datelined September 23, 2015 at 8:13 a.m. (Democratic politicians under pressure to support "another candidate," rather than Senator Sanders)
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