Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative [Hardcover]

Brock and his buddies attended the delivery of the current Rosemary's Baby of a presidential administration that we currently cower under in a state of near-perpetual fear and utter victimhood. He appears to repent as it twitches away in its black cradle, but his confessions and regrets are little more than weak platitudes, and the author's core personal defects are neither explored nor resolved here in any meaningful way. At the bitter end, I was left with a haunting feeling that endures. The book is billed as an autobiography, but the interior world of its author is either heavily guarded or nonexistent. Who is this guy, and who abducted his soul? Certainly not the Berkeley anarchists who angered him, or his neocon professor friends who mentored him - no comic book activists or university faculty could ever warp a smart guy like this to such an extreme. Don't crack this book expecting anything but solid concrete - it's nothing more than a running diary describing who he screwed, how hard he screwed 'em, and his resulting ample compensation. That's what you get, but you get a LOT - perhaps more than you can take. Occasionally Brock describes his motivations with blubbering, intelligence-insulting rationale: "I wanted status. I wanted love and acceptance." After a while these shallow reflective utterances taper down to a predictable drone as he plods through detailed descriptions of year after unrelenting year of his own original and continuous journalistic atrocities.

Liberals wonder why they do not possess a frankenstein-meets-godzilla kind of media monster that might lumber forth to confront the fascist hate regime fueled by minds like the one floating around inside Brock's head. Read this book and you might gain some insight into the problem, but only by its very LACK of a real explanation. Maybe it has something to do with personality type. Brock's is a perfect fit for the extreme right - vain, superficial, materialistic, opportunistic, sex-confused - his every paragraph is an act of servile, self-conscious spite dedicated to advancing his puppetmasters' agenda. There's no way the left can compete with this stuff - David Brock's work makes Michael Moore's look like empirical science by comparison.

Actually, it's not even ironic that Brock could come out of the closet and still survive within the hard right on nothing more than his skills in the art of character assassination and slander. To me, there's no irony in even the very thought of this book, and this idea kind of scares me, and it leads straight to the conclusion that Brock is an incorrigible operator, a hard-core narcissist with a Huey Lewis soundtrack bubbling away endlessly in the shallow murk of his own semi-conscious mind. At the end of the day, David Brock was never really 'blinded by the right'; he was already blind before he ever enlisted his services. This book doesn't describe how that happened. Read at your own risk, serve up a short dose of pity, and pray that you and your offspring will never turn out like David Brock.

Anyway, I'm pretty conservative, and learned a lot. Brock's is a hard book to get through, but I'll never view the 90's (Newt, Clinton, all media) the same again. Oh yeah, back to my review title: Brock tells of his relationships with right-wing queens Arianna Huffington, Laura Ingraham, and Ann Coulter. More details next time! Do they like to play quarters? Caps?! Keggers or wine boxes?