"Globalisation," by Juan Daniel Perrotta < http://www.oocities.org/mx/p_t_live/ >

From Watergate to W.: The story of the Right in the US

Stuart Bechman <sbechman@sbcglobal.net> <http://www.consortiumnews.com/2002/050602a.html>

David Brock & the Watergate Legacy

by Robert Parry

David Brock’s tell-all Blinded by the Right parallels another account by a young man who came to Washington and found a home in Republican circles. That confessional book was Blind Ambition by Richard Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean, who described how his drive to succeed led him to join the crimes of Watergate.

In that sense, the two “blinded” books by former insiders can be seen as book-ends. Dean’s marks the early days of Nixon’s vision of a mechanism for dirty tricks to neutralize political enemies – and Brock’s chronicles its maturity through the impeachment battles against Bill Clinton and ultimately its success installing George W. Bush in the White House.

This continuum of Republican attack politics from Watergate to W. is the unacknowledged back story of Brock’s book, which is its own back story to the last third of those three decades. While missing the larger historical context, Brock’s book still ranks as a valuable guidebook explaining how the conservative attack machine worked in the 1990s and who had become its key players.

The book’s value in dissecting the dirty tricks – along with detailing the raging hypocrisies of many right-wing operatives – has prompted a new campaign by conservatives to discredit Brock personally and thus his book. They have denounced him as an admitted liar in the past who allegedly is lying still, a reaction reminiscent of the Republican fury directed at Dean when he shifted from helping Nixon’s Watergate cover-up to exposing it.

In both cases, the conservative attacks on these “traitors” had a “pay no heed to that man behind the curtain” quality. In Dean’s case, the attacks failed because Nixon’s White House tapes corroborated Dean’s account. In Brock’s case, the outcome is still in doubt, as a far-more sophisticated conservative attack machine seems confident that it can promote any false counter-charge against Brock and make it stick.

The most prominent assault on Blinded by the Right’s credibility has come from David Horowitz, a conservative operative who says Brock defamed him with a bogus anecdote in which Horowitz allegedly uttered an anti-gay slur. As more information has come out, however, Horowitz’s denial has collapsed, with Brock’s account now corroborated … more