Rating: 
Summary: pretty good but
Review: Blinded by the Right is a pretty good autobiographical accound of David Brock who grew distant from the left in the early 1980s at Berkley to right wing righter attacking the likes of Anita Hill and Hilary Clinton to liberal. However, Brock doesn't seem of showing that he had a whole lot of belief of his work as a conservative. He admits that he fully didn't believe what he wrote about Anita Hill and wrote what he did out of pressure from his publishers. At the same time, it doesn't seem as though his opinions on the issue change much. He stands as almost a libertarian that really didn't fit into the whole Reagan-Era religious right of the 1980s which he was apart of, something that was only compounded by his being homosexual. He mainly changes sides because of the problems he saw with the right. Brock does do a good job of showing some problems such as their witch-hunt mentality when the attack Democrats like the Clintons and those who speack out against conservatives such as Anita Hill.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating
Review: Where Ann Coulter's new diatribe is filled with name calling and hate (and light on the facts) Brock's new work is a fascinating look both at the inner workings of of the right wing, but an interesting recounting of Brock's personal journey. The far right is even more loathsome than I had imagined.
Rating:
Summary: Informative and Enlightening...yet Distasteful
Review: David Brock tells us what most people who pay attention to politics and detail already knew. There was/is a right wing conspiracy and it included alot of players that we suspected and some unexpected contributors as well. Is anyone surprised to find out that Newt Gingrich was dedicated to the downfall of the Clinton administration or that Britt Hume is not an impartial journalist? I found the mechanics of the whole operation to be interesting but it all boils down to one thing...enough money can buy popular culture. Surprise surprise the moral conservatives are every bit as dirty as they accuse the liberals of being. To me, both of the major political parties are disappointing and to know that some of the obsessed zealots on the right are in extremely powerful positions right now does not make me any more comfortable about our current leadership...nor the alternative. I find the current political climate repugnant and frankly after reading Brock's book, I don't see much hope. The book for the most part rings true. The reason for the 4 stars instead of 5 is that like many of the other reviewers, I find Brock to be suspect. It is obvious to me that he has not found the peace that he claims. His prose brims with contempt for people who were once his closest friends and allies. The adjectives and nouns he uses to refer to the people "elves" etc, reveal a little about his motives. Does Brock believe what he is writing? Maybe...but, make no mistake about it the book is vengeful. Brock still has a lot of healing to do. The world he left was vicious and venomous and he is still using the tactics to survive in this one. This guy is Iago to any politician's Othello. He is dangerous because he doesn't seem to know what he wants, he just doesn't want anyone else to have it. That being said, I am thankful that he wrote this book. While he is working through his personal pain, he is removing the blindfold from the eyes of a lot of people who follow the right with such blind faith. I am always skeptical when one party claims to have moral superiority over another. There is almost never any substance behind that argument.
Rating:
Summary: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
Review: This books details the vast right wing conspiracy that anybody who followed politics in the nineties knew about. Especially accurate is Brock's description of the nasty, hateful, condescending attitude of the right. The book provides an inside look at the lies, character assassination, and deceit of the Republican Party, which Brock notes has lost any moral authority. A very interesting book that shows how corrupt the conservative movement has become.
Rating: 
Summary: aww, poor baby
Review: If the "conscience" of this writer was bothering him before, I can't imagine how he feels after publishing an entire work of half-truths and outright lies. If this is all the left can come up with to feel better about themselves, I almost want to let them have it. After all, how did it perform with reading Americans? Hmm... maybe the Republican so-called "sleaze machine" is not so bad as we thought... Unfortunately, in the liberal effect Ann Coulter has titled "the vaccuum of ideas," this is about as good as it gets. So... if you're gullible... better eat up while it's still in print.
Rating:
Summary: a fascinating look at the culture warriors of the right
Review: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't after you, as this book proves abundantly....All in all this was a riveting book, to be recommended to all who are interested in the consequences of political manipulation of the media for cynical purposes.
Rating:
Summary: Where's the Beef?
Review: If half of what this guy says was true, it would be terrible. But the half-truths and outright falsehoods are too many to name. This book never made it into the top 5 bestsellers on the NYT bestsellers list, as Goldberg's book "Bias" did (how many weeks was it #1 bestseller?), and for good reasons. It made a big stir with leftists then dropped from sight like a lead balloon.
Rating:
Summary: Conservatives play the blame game
Review: This book just goes to prove what I've told my conservative friends and family members for years: Right-wing conservatives can't tell us how to solve our problems. They can only tell us who to blame. The Republican Party as it exists today cannot function without an enemy. Once the boogeyman of the Soviet Union went away the Republicans had to turn on their own "liberal" countrymen, after, of course, the "evil Arabs" were defeated and our oil supply was once more safe. Now we're fighting the Arabs again, and while I in no way condone the events of September 11th, I find it convienient that we once again, with another Bush in office, have a distraction from the fact that our economy is going down in flames. Interesting how we seem to discuss invading Iraq every time our attention is grabbed by a failing domestic policy. I guess war is good for business...as long as a Bush is in office.
Rating:
Summary: Well written exposure of conservative tactics.
Review: I enjoyed this book mostly for its detailed tracing of the Washington conservative press and the 'agendas' that conservatives seeth with in their hypocritical, fundamentalist world-view.
Brock's writing is quick and interesting, keeping the reader flowing along. I don't think there are many people who are oblivious to the underhanded tactics conservatives use, but it is good to see someone brave enough to speak openly about them. I would've given the book 5 stars, except that it seems to be two books--one about neo-conservativism, and another about Brock's coming-out. I can see why Brock wrote about his sexual-orientation: to show his motivations for joining and then leaving the neo-cons, but the issue seemed way too dominant in this book and distracted from the neo-con tract. Other than that, it's a great book.
Now, Brock should look at the other side, liberalism, and do the same kind of book exposing their tactics, although I don't think there would be any surprising difference, but it would balance things out. I'm glad I don't live in that sea of labels, but it's fun to read about the circus!
Rating:
Summary: Connecting the Dots
Review: I spent most of the early-to-mid '90s as a college student somewhere near Washington, D.C., and had far too many friends active in the College Republicans. I remember hearing many of the scandalous assertions against Bill Clinton, repeated wholesale by op-ed writers in the campus newspaper. Even though I voted for Clinton twice, I remember suffering from "Clinton Fatigue" by the time 1997 rolled around. I remember waking up early on a Saturday morning to watch Bob Livingston resign as Speaker of the House on C-SPAN, and remember feeling relieved when the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him at the end of the impeachment trial. And I remember David Brock's name surfacing at various points along the way. "Blinded by the Right" is a remarkable work, although perhaps not in the way Brock intended. It connects the dots in the infamous "vast right-wing conspiracy", a shadowy sort of far-right cabal that engineered President Clinton's would-be downfall. At the same time Brock attempts to repudiate his "investigative journalism" of a decade ago -- his trashing of Anita Hill, the discovery of the Arkansas State Troopers who may have solicited dates for the President, and his career-breaking effort to find dirt on Hillary Clinton. The first of these books, the history, is a fascinating read. The second, the biography, is exhausting. As a former member of the far right, Brock is able to describe the incestuous financial connections that linked Capital Hill Republicans to the '90s sort of gonzo journalism that hounded the President. He describes reprehensible actions taken by those who are still in power, and undercuts nearly every conservative pundit or op-ed writer who still spews against the "liberals" today. At the same time that Brock paints a nasty picture of Ann Coulter, you can turn to the New York Times Book Review and see that Ms. Coulter has authored the best-selling non-fiction book in the US, and it's about "Slander" and "liberal lies". He even manages to tie in the Rev. Tim LaHaye, creator of the "Left Behind" series (the latest installment of which is currently the best-selling fiction book in the US), to the conspiracy. There's even a Tom Wolfe cameo. Just who dominates the media, anyway? The right has been waging a culture war for over a decade, and Brock shows just how the conservative intelligentsia won a chess game that they played uncontested. What drags down "Blinded by the Right" is Brock?s repetitive apologia. Every few paragraphs are punctuated by Joyceian epiphanies (?Only then did I begin to allow myself to see ...?). Factor in the author?s own retraction of his earlier works, and then the reader begins to wonder how much of "Blinded" is real, and how much is vendetta. But even if you discount a good portion of what Brock writes, the objective facts speak for themselves. Brock may feel a little better about his conscience now, but many others have a lot to be depressed about...
|
