WAPO BURIES THE LEAD!
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?
