Book Review: Killing the Messenger

Killing the Messenger:The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillaryand Hijack Your Governmentby David BrockTwelve, 2015There's an extra measure of annoyance to books that start arguments right in their titles, before they've even properly begun laying out their various brands of bullshit. The new book by David Brock, a former Clinton-basher who experienced a road-to-Damascus conversion and is now a vociferous convert, is one of those books. Its title in full is: Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government.It's only fourteen words long, but I count six things wrong with it. Six things – before we've even reached the Dedication. First: who is “the messenger”? In the context of the book it's got to be either Brock or his subject this time around, former Secretary of State and current Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. But messengers carry official – and incontrovertible – tidings from a higher authority, and who is the higher authority in such a scenario? For Brock, it must be Clinton, who's hardly incontrovertible, and for Clinton it must be God, or the Will of the People, or Truth, or something equally outlandish. Second: “the right-wing plot,” intentionally meant to echo Hillary Clinton's own oft-mocked allusion to a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” is no more credible that its template. Third: “derail” implies a track, a train – in other words, a schedule, something prearranged and settled, which is itself an insult to the electorate in an active campaigning season. Fourth: “Hillary,” as though we're all on a first-name basis with this particular Clinton, as though she were a member of the family, set on doing good things unless she's derailed. Fifth: “hijack” is a terrorism term – an act of lawlessness, not something to be compared to partisan political attacks however underhanded. Sixth: “Your,” again implying a certain droit de seigneur on the part of either Brock or his subject or both – your government is in danger of being hijacked, and some of your rulers are doing the hijacking while other of your rulers are trying, desperately, to warn you about it; it's not the rulers' government either way, but you should certainly care. And sixth: “government,” as if the government rather than merely its leadership were being contested here, as if there's only one person standing between the vulnerable masses and a cadre of dictators.Before even the book's title is finished, we know a great deal about the ordeal to come. And Brock doesn't fail to provide it: his book is a step-by-step, scandal-by-scandal exoneration of Hillary Clinton, and the exoneration is meant to be total: according to Brock, Hillary Clinton was not only not involved in any of the two dozen scandals associated with her name and the name of her husband, but a) they weren't really scandals at all, and b) she's never been associated with any impropriety, no matter how trivial. In Killing the Messenger, we're offered the first completely selfless public official since Cato.Brock knows we know at least something about his subject matter:

By now you know the litany: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Vincent Foster's suicide, Hillary's Rose Law Firm billing records, the Clinton body count, Hillary's cattle futures trades, Pardongate, et cetera. All were subject to various and sundry official investigations, countless column inches and cable TV segments, and deranged “reports” from the fringe right wing – all amounting to nothing in the end.

Leaving aside the crassness of saying that somebody's suicide “amounted to nothing in the end,” there's the simple fact that investigations into every single one of the items in this litany revealed genuinely gross improprieties, illegalities, and ethical aberrations, from Vincent Foster's death, when the Clinton White House obstructed the official investigation and destroyed the crime scene photographs, to “Hillary's cattle futures trades,” the bulk of which were purchased for her – with his own money, as a gift – by James Blair, who was legal counsel for Tyson Foods, Arkansas's biggest company (and one of its biggest political donors), while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, to Whitewater, which Brock describes as “a money-losing land deal … that the Clintons had invested in.” His description of the aftermath makes it sound like a mishap involving slightly misfiled paperwork and ending in a kiss on the, er, cheek:

The feeding frenzy over Whitewater in Washington was such that President Clinton felt compelled to call for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the matter. Eventually, a right-wing judge, Ken Starr, took over the inquiry and proceeded to go very far afield from his original mandate, probing the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, through which he found a former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, with whom Clinton had had a consensual sexual dalliance.

The entire machinery of the Clinton political success is built around one key component: the forgetfulness of the American public. Accusations of rape? Endless allegations of financial misconduct? An open buffet of favors for well-placed friends and business associates? A parade of “sexual dalliance”? Inept gerrymandering on Capitol Hill? Hundreds of thousands of dollars of favor-procuring funds funneled through a Foundation obviously created to facilitate payola on a literally global scale? Fabricated stories about being under fire in war zones? None of these things will be fatal if you just keep 'em coming and keep burying them in denial and depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-'is'-is doublespeak. The perfect complement to that machinery is the kind of rhetorical trick Brock tries to play here: lump it all together, shake your head over how intractable it all is, and chalk it up to a vast right-wing conspiracy that's making mountains out of molehills solely to persecute the Clintons.But even so, his book has to deal with new molehills, because, as sharp-eyed journalists even back in the 1990s were wryly commenting, Clinton venality is the gift that keeps on giving. Killing the Messenger is, in all but name, a defense brief for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, so it has to deal with at least some of the most recent scandals in which she's been involved. There have been roughly a dozen such scandals in the last three years, so even in a narrow time-frame, Brock still has to be selective. He must deal with the 2012 disaster at the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi while Clinton was Secretary of State, when four Americans lost their lives as a result of a massive coordinated attack by Islamic gunmen on September 11.In a classic move no doubt copied from the Clintons, Brock summarizes the Benghazi event in a way that will help him out when it comes time to assess it:

Twelve hours after the first attack began, the evacuation was complete. Some thirty surviving Americans had safely escaped from Benghazi – bringing with them the bodies of those who had perished.That's what happened in Benghazi. And if the right had never spun up the attack into a fake scandal, that's exactly how we might remember it today: as a tragedy in which four patriots who had taken on difficult and dangerous assignments in service to their country lost their lives.

Needless to say, “the right” never claimed that the scandal of Benghazi involved any of these facts. Rather, the scandal comes from the fact that Secretary Clinton had ample warning that the attacks were likely and did nothing (in fact, turned down requests for added security). Brock devotes a glance at the fact that Clinton delayed her Benghazi testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because of a concussion that kept her away from the committee for a solid month and struck more than a few observers as exceedingly coincidentally timed; “the good news was that she was fine,” Brock writes, “the bad news was that conservatives were already using this health scare to spin a wild web of conspiracy theories.” When Clinton finally did testify, she had the gall to table-pound on the very point of future preparedness. In defending her, Brock mainly cites the fact that some people have thought she needed defending:

It's a seemingly perfect attack against Hillary, because it ties together a series of conservative tropes about her: that she's secretive and imperious, cold and uncaring, obsessed with her political standing, and calculating in everything she does.

He hits the same note when it comes to the scandal involving the fact that while she was Secretary of State, Clinton conducted public as well as private business on her personal email, routed through her personal server. Again, Brock's defense mostly boils down to the fact that Clinton's enemies have always been out to get her and will pick at any irregularity:

And conservatives were already crowing, not just about the possibility that Hillary might actually be in trouble this time, but about the way the story fit into their caricature of her as calculating and secretive, someone who put her own political well-being above everything else – even, possibly, our national security; was she conducting diplomacy via Gmail?!?!

For you seminarians and future rhetoricians, that's a question mark followed by an exclamation point followed by a question mark followed by another exclamation point. God help us.