The juiciest bit of news in Saturday’s Washington Post was entombed in the last paragraphs of a story on page A-21. The piece, by media reporter Howie “The Beast” Kurtz, revealed that Clinton attorney David Kendall has “been helping” an Esquire author “research an article on Starr’s Whitewater probe,” even to the extent of asking Clinton allies to cooperate with the author. And the favored author is … David Brock!
That wouldn’t be the same David Brock who wrote a 1992 American Spectator hit piece calling Anita Hill “a bit nutty and a bit slutty,” would it? The David Brock whose 1993 Troopergate article revived the Clinton sex scandal and portrayed Kendall’s client and patron Hillary Clinton as a foul-mouthed bitch who orders state troopers to fetch her tampons? The David Brock whose subsequent book about Hillary practically called her a Commie? The nipple-baring Brock who then played the victim in an Esquire article (illustrated with an exhibitionistic photo of Brock in an open shirt posing as St. Sebastian) when, despite his hit pieces and sleazy red-baiting, right wingers snubbed him for supposedly going soft on Hillary? (He concluded, for example, that Bill and not Hillary was to blame in Whitewater.) The David Brock who even in this Esquire article defended his Troopergate snooping? The David Brock whom Chatterbox last tracked palling around Georgetown with Clinton nemesis Matt Drudge? …
Chatterbox is pausing to un-reel its mind … There. Just one question. Has David Kendall gone insane? … OK, one more question: Is Brock’s whole I-was-a victim-of-the-right routine a brilliant Nosenko-like cover that has allowed him to penetrate the Clinton camp’s innermost recesses–gaining the confidence of the normally closed-mouthed Kendall–after which Brock will turn the tables on his original enemies? True, one interpretation of Brock’s recent anti-right attack is that he’s undergone a “metamorphosis” (Kendall’s word). But another is that he knows the publicity-grabbing value of a strategic conversion to a contrarian position. What will the self-promoting, contrarian conclusion be when his Esquire piece comes due? … For Jacob Weisberg’s critical review of Brock’s Hillary book (Weisberg says Brock “slings enough mud to drown a Bangladeshi village”) click here.
KURTZ’S SECOND JUICY TIDBIT is that the White House nickname for conspiracy-minded Clinton defender Sidney Blumenthal is “G.K.,” which stands for “grassy knoll.” … But enough filching from Kurtz:
********CHATTERBOX INTERGALACTIC EXCLUSIVE********
Must credit CHATTERBOX or feel its mighty wrath.
***EXCLUSIVE***
Chatterbox has learned that Monica Lewinsky’s mother, Marcia Lewis, used certain familiar epithets to describe her husband, Bernard, when she divorced him back in the late 1980s. The epithets? The Creep and El Schmucko … the very same phrases daughter Monica would later reportedly use to describe President Clinton on the scandalous Tripp tapes! … Clinton defenders could of course use this info to portray Monica as a deluded fantasist who is just borrowing her mother’s story for her imaginary tale … Take it away, G.K.! … Oops. Chatterbox forgot. You’re portraying Monica as the sympathetic victim-of-Starr this week … Well, you can savage her next week, then!
With the Washington Post’s report that Linda Tripp met with Paula Jones’ lawyers the night before Clinton’s deposition, the winner of Slate’s recent Name-That-Scandal Contest–“Flytrap”–becomes more apt than ever … Chatterbox is already saving up for its “The Snitch Set Him Up!” T-shirt … Does that come in long?
