“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