Chatterbox

Whopper of the Week: David Brock

“I’m still at home at The American Spectator. Though the Washington Post recently reported that conservative donors have been agitating for my dismissal, any such pressure has been resisted by the editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. Founded as The Alternative in 1967, the magazine ‘was born wayward and determined to be skeptical,’ as Tyrrell put it in his memoir, TheConservative Crack-Up. Tyrrell and I have agreed to disagree about Hillary:one bright spot in an otherwise bleak conservative landscape [italics Chatterbox’s].”

–David Brock on R. Emmett Tyrrell in his July 1997 Esquire article, “Confessions of a Right-Wing HitMan.

“As the Spectator’s editor-in-chief, Tyrrell turned the magazine into the leading organ of Clinton-hating scandalmongers and, in the process, helped spearhead the intellectual corruption of the conservative movement.”

–David Brock on R. Emmett Tyrrell in his August 2001 Talk article, “I Killed Anita Hill (I’m Sorry).”

Got a whopper? Send it to  chatterbox@slate.com. To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

Whopper Archive:

June 22, 2001: Edmund Morris

June 15, 2001: George W. Bush

June 8, 2001: Nepali Prince Regent (subsequently, King) Gyanendra

June 1, 2001: Mary McGrory

May 25, 2001: Ari Fleischer

May 18, 2001: York, Pa., Mayor Charles Robertson

May 11, 2001: Ted Olson

May 4, 2001: Rear Admiral Craig Quigley

April 27, 2001: Ben Affleck

April 20, 2001: South Carolina state legislator Chip Limehouse

April 13, 2001: Gray Davis

April 6, 2001: Sumner Redstone

March 30, 2001: Spencer Abraham

March 23, 2001: George W. Bush, Rep. Jennifer Dunn, and/or the Treasury Department

March 16, 2001: George W. Bush

March 9, 2001: Russ Freyman, spokesman, National Association of Manufacturers

March 2, 2001: Paul O’Neill

Feb. 23, 2001: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton

Feb. 16, 2001: Oscar spokesman John Pavlik

Feb. 9, 2001: Lynne Cheney

Feb. 2, 2001: Bobby Thomson

Jan. 26, 2001: Denise Rich