Goldberg's Real Bias Comes Out of the Closet with David Brock?

Kent Southard: THE JOURNAL OF AN APOSTATE WHITE GUY

The mystery of the conservative homosexual gives an interesting insight into the nature of modern conservatism. This new kind of "conservatism" which is the guardian of individual rights and liberties of old -- not the close watcher of constitutional checks and balances that old Republicans like me grew up with. It is more the exclusive advocate of established power and privilege, harkening back to the days before the American Revolution.

Terry Dolan who raised money for Reagan illustrated exactly the "Tory" model - whereas Reagan and George W. Bush are 'Big Picture' men, meaning they will read whatever script is put in front of them, and the powers behind the throne are raving lunatic billionaires like Jack Welch and Richard Mellon Scaife, the positions in between need to be filled with individuals meeting quite specific criteria: they must be deeply referential to power and power's ego and they must be detail oriented and yet not threaten their superiors with their knowledge. They must be sensitive enough to translate the brute urges of their patrons into finely crafted "policies" and provide rhetoric fitted to the needs at hand. Basically, as interior decorators provide service to give tasteful display of material wealth, these conservative homosexual ideologues endeavor to provide the tasteful display of raw power.

It's not just an individual here and there, it's virtually a whole section of the GOP machinery, from talking head pundits to the most influential theorists to congressional chief's of staff to congressmen themselves. (Not widely reported was the lyrical moment when conservative firebrand Bob Dornan went out to dinner with his longtime chief of staff and afterwards, when driving through the warm evening with the top down on the convertible, the chief of staff turned to Dornan and said, 'Poppy, I'm gay.')

I couldn't help but notice recently that after several months with everyone driving around with a white-knuckled grip on the wheel of fear and/or rage, there's been a noticeable return of the officially mandated conservative white male driving style - a peculiar slump/slouch with a half twist that allows the driver to drape his forearm across the top of the steering wheel, his wrist hanging languidly off the front. (Why the uber-butch would adopt this limp wrist display as the secret handshake between dittoheads in traffic is one of life's little mysteries, maybe it's to show that driving is so easy for them they can handle it with just their feminine side.) And there's an increased certitude in the gesture recently, as if all the conservative stars are in alignment and George Bush in his heaven.

Perhaps the keystone in that alignment is the book "Bias," by Bernard Goldberg, a former CBS News hand who (after putting up with horrid liberals for years, forcing himself to take their money and be in their company) is now making more big bucks and a bigger splash by selling "proof" of liberal bias in the media. The ideas in "Bias" are the last needed details in the mental universe under construction these past decades by conservatives searching for excuses for their feelings of inferiority and their need to dominate anyone with ideas different than their own.

"Don't think, let me do your thinking for you!" Rush Limbaugh intoned; and to his faithful millions. Thus his listeners and those of Ollie North, G. Gordon Liddy and the rest, was delivered an entire world fully furnished with opinions, insider truths, and damning facts the 'liberal' media was criminally hiding.

Central to the message, the keystone of this pre-packaged conservative universe, was that Limbaugh et. al. was telling the truth, whereas the alleged 'liberal' media was not. Inasmuch as Goldberg makes a case, it's basically that many individuals that have been prominent in the mainstream commercial media have not made friends with extremist conservatives. And his charges of bias also seems rooted in accusations that conservative organizations are always identified as such, and liberal those of liberal ones are not.

There was some truth to this, maybe 30 years ago but a case can be made that the opposite has been the case for the last decade, with organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute left unremarked on, while something like People for the American Way is unfailingly referred to as a "liberal" organization." But the thinness of Goldberg's thesis is of little importance to the true believers.

What would really rock their boat if they were open minded enough to read is another book, on the bestseller's lists, David Brock's "Blinded by the Right." Brock was one of the heavy lifters furnishing the conservative mental universe during the early 1990s; the writer of a book damning Anita Hill and the author of magazine pieces that set in motion the gossip machine that disabled Bill Clinton's presidency.

In his new book, Brock says that what he wrote as a conservative were lies and fabrications to curry the favor of his chosen friends and mentors and that he was instructed, trained and paid lie and fabricate. Furthermore, he was part of a conservative opinion manufacturing machine that consisted of many closeted homosexuals.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich, in his review of Brock's book, provided further detail of the centrality of homosexuals to the modern conservative movement - from its origins in the 50's with Whitaker Chambers, J. Edgar Hoover, and Nixon mentor Roy Cohn; to American Conservative Movement founder Marvin Liebman; to Terry Dolan and the ring of conservative gays, now all dead of AIDS, that formed the original PAC that raised the money to get Reagan elected. The biggest secret the conservative movement keeps from its dittohead legions are that the opinions they hold so fiercely were crafted by men they would normally do physical violence to.