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

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

List Price: $25.95
Your Price: $16.42
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
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: 4 stars
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: 1 stars
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: 4 stars
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: 1 stars
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: 5 stars
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: 4 stars
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: 4 stars
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...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The banality of sleaze
Review: Those who are Republican apologist may condemn this book, although they would have little direct evidence to discredit much of its analysis. Simply put, Brock became a conservative Republican after witnessing the intolerance of politically correct students shouting down Conservative speakers at University symposia, among them Fitzpatrick and Kissenger. He decided to get even with a vengeance. However, I believe the title of the book is rather a misnomer. It should be titled "Blinded by my own Poor Judgment"; yes, and that judgment was Brock's. After publishing an attack on Anita Hill, a more even-handed book on Hillary, Brock began to see the hypocricy of long time Clinton-haters. As Brock said, there might not have been a "VAST" right-wing conspiracy against Clinton, but there was a conspiracy that operated for years among conservatives with monetary and public-opinion influence. Once Brock, a gay man, saw the affairs, drunkenness, back-stabbing, the large constituency of "closeted" gay people in the Republican hierarchy, and the shear hatefulness of many on the right, he got turned off. What struck me most was the shear ineptitude and banality of the right-wing players. I teach in a university and my college freshman sound much more prescient and knowledgeable than the host of attorneys, media mavens, "monied" elite that poured money into conservative "think tanks." The book actually helped me realize that the term "conservative think tank" is an oxymoron. The language directly quoted by the author of many righteous Republicans is not worthy of a street fight, and their tactics much less fair. Hopefully this book will do the simple job of showing the conservative right has no clothes (literally and figuratively). My attitude was a disinterested one when I began the book; but its portrait of the sleazy characters who inhabit the right-wing speaks for itself. No need to interpret; just read what they said. The current political/economic scene, ie., summer 2002 demonstrates I believe that the new right has no ideas, just anger. As James Baldwin stated, "Anger ultimately does most damage to the one who hates." So, the piteous quality of the right does shine through, although they would never admit or consider themselves in that light. But as the song goes "De Nile just ain't a river in Egypt."

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent
Review: It is hard to add more to the long list of reviews here, but I'll try. This book does a good job of exposing the underbelly of the conservative right. Man, it can get ugly down there! Brock's unflinching story does not pull any punches and he names all the names. Get the book and read it, it is quite a page-turner. You'll either love it or hate it, but either way you'll have a strong reaction to it. This shwos how the dirty politics games works.


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