I'm writing as fast as I can. David Brock wasn't just kidding when he wrote, in Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government (Twelve), "It's now happening at such warp speed that the opportunities for injecting misinformation into the bloodstream of the public conversation have dramatically increased." The "it" of that sentence, the subject of Brock's book, is bigger than an indefinite pronoun can name. It's the 24-hour news cycle, the media din, the relentless salvos in what Brock is not alone in calling "the Clinton wars."
Make no mistake. This gay self-described writer and Democratic activist is partisan. In his penultimate paragraph he declares, "Hillary Clinton's election as president is a political and moral necessity for many, many reasons." His new book is unlikely to sway anyone's choice, but he makes it clear from the start that it's a call to action, and it's written with the kind of urgency that may get a certain subset of Americans to take some of the measures he spells out in his what-you-can-do chapter. But the bulk of the book is devoted to busting the chops of the radical right wing he once served as a hitman.
Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, Brock's confessional 2002 memoir, provided a detailed account of his work, mostly through published writing, for the far-right flank of the conservative movement he once lived to serve, including attempts to smear the Clintons through the "Troopergate" scandal he helped concoct, codify and promulgate. Brock's political conversion happened concomitantly with his coming out, which he also wrote about unsparingly. But it was the former that eventually resulted in a personal phone call from then-former President Clinton that, in turn, brought him into the fold.
As Brock tells it, it was during that phone call that he first articulated to himself his goal of helping to set the record regarding the Clintons straight. The principal result �" though Brock's activism has taken a number of forms, all of which he discusses in his new book �" was his founding (and still directing) Media Matters for America, a nonprofit devoted to correcting, on the spot and in real time, the right's attempts to smear the Clintons (and others) with provable untruths.
Killing the Messenger is, largely, the summa theological of that work. Brock devotes chapters to each of the "scandals" dogging Hillary Clinton's current candidacy �" Benghazi, the emails, the "phony philanthropy" of the Clinton Foundation �" and subjects them to intellectual scrutiny and, when the charges are not too speculative to require refutation in the negative, facts.
I had just finished reading his chapter on Benghazi �" the first account of the incident and its political fallout that I'd actually been able to follow �" when Rep. Kevin McCarthy bowed out of the House Speaker race, but not without at first talking about the "Benghazi special committee" "we [Republicans] put together," the results of which were "[Hillary's] numbers going down." In the "warp speed" of the reporting and spin of McCarthy's "gaffe," jubilant Democrats called it his having given Hillary a "get out of Benghazi free card." Brock's painstaking examination of the affair left me thinking not that his chapter was superfluous but that it was only a matter of time before the same coals were fanned back into flame.
Brock's sign-off final chapter �" a juicy bit of storytelling about the Benghazi Select Committee's grueling deposition of Sidney Blumenthal, a trusted Clinton advisor and subsequently personal friend of Brock's, transcripts of which Republican members of the committee refuse to release �" is dated July 8 of this year. Jeb is the presumptive GOP presidential candidate, and Trump has yet to be trumped up.
In an earlier day, we correctly would have called Brock a Clinton apologist, a word to which darker associations have accrued. He may be right in writing, "In any fair view, the Clintons, especially the former president, deserved to join the pantheon of history's most esteemed philanthropic actors." But he's got factual rebuttals galore to the seemingly self-perpetuating slurs about Hillary that charge her with political cunning or ineptitude while imputing a suspiciously bad character to this secretive, cold, mendacious, ambitious, castrating, aging (and worst of all) woman (in the words of right-wing pundit Cliff May, a "Vaginal American").
In my case Brock is singing to the choir. Maybe because I'm a music critic, I cringe when he slides off-key. Not infrequently you turn the page and find yourself, for a moment, in a kind of fun-house hall of mirrors, in which every good Clinton thing reflects back on Brock. But he's engaging in talking about the lumps he's taken for his unstinting advocacy of the couple. Fox News called him "Captain Crazy Hair." Maureen Dowd (who gets hers back) called him "a Hillary 'hatchet.'" And this: "The strangest comment, apparently meant to be an antigay slur, came from the National Review's Jonah Goldberg, who fantasized about my taking orders from Hillary after 'slinking' out of a 'leather onesie.'"
As an expat, I was appreciative of the information with which he painted the Koch brothers as an unprecedented threat to American democracy. And as a disillusioned journalist, I savored his regular takedowns of the media, including The New York Times, which all on its own has got me to need far less than my 10 free articles a month. His most measured assessment is: "The New York Times is the most well-respected outlet in American journalism, the newspaper of record, but as we've seen, they've proven to be wildly unreliable when it comes to the Clintons."
In an unguarded moment early enough in the book to get my attention, Brock writes, "As a committed Democrat now myself, I think I've observed the party long enough from the inside to say that there's nothing worse than a 'worried Democrat.'" I'd have thought maybe the Kochs were worse, but Brock honed in on that very thing I have been, someone who has been consistently, apologetically pro-Hillary. Living like the rest of us in the "media echo chamber," I've accumulated some wholly unfounded reservations about a woman I've in fact witnessed as almost shockingly knowledgeable, intellectually brilliant, articulate, committed, and all but unbelievably caring about a political system that seems bent solely on savaging her.
It's worried Democrats like me who have most need of this brave, biased book.