NOAH ON BROCK

A devastating piece by Slate’s Tim Noah about the pathological lying of David Brock, serial and unremitting mendacity that liberal ideologues like Rick Hertzberg and Frank Rich gloss over in their continued effort to demonize the right. Noah is particularly good at Brock’s most recent blatant lie – about the treatment in his book of Bruce Bawer, and whether Bawer had any conflict of interest in reviewing the book for Washington Post’s Book World. Bawer had no real conflict of interest – he didn’t work for the American Spectator at the time Brock did, his gay alienation from the right might actually lead him to sympathize with Brock, and his departure from the Spectator was not in any way something that could lead him to view Brock disparagingly (on the contrary, in fact, it confirms Brock’s current view of the homophobia rife at that magazine at the time). Still, Brock simply lies in print in the Washington Post about the issue, as Noah definitvely shows. Those crack journalists, Len Downie and Robert Kaiser, took this lie at face value, never seem to have investigated it, and blamed Bawer for the flap. Yes, Bawer is a friend of mine. But you don’t have to be a friend of someone to see when he’s been wronged.