Thursday, June 06, 2002

Jane Mayer reviews Blinded by the Right here.

She misses one fact. David Brock didn't coin "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty." The phrase he actually used was "a little nutty and a little slutty." The one responsible for the more catchy version of the phrase was none other than Crazy Andy Sullivan.

UPDATE: oops. Privateer points out correctly that the phrase Brock used was "a bit nutty and a bit slutty." It was Andrew Sullivan that added the 'little,' not the 'bit.' I need a fact-checker..


Anyway, here's the reference from google's cache of Medianews letters.




Setting it straight on nutty/slutty
From STACI KRAMER: Subject: The New Yorker's right. [Re the letter below.] David Brock in The American Spectator, "The Real Anita Hill", March 1992: "So Hill may be a bit nutty, and a bit slutty, but
is she an outright liar?"

Andrew Sullivan appears to have started the incorrect version in the Sunday Times, May 15, 1994:

>>Hill, the woman memorably described by the right-wing American Spectator as '"little bit nutty and a little bit slutty," now adorns the front page of the even more right-wing Washington Times to embarrass
President Bill Clinton.<<

By April 1995, American Spectator managing editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski was writing about the phrase and the way it was being used in various iterations against Brock.

>> The nutty-slutty phrase was first reported by the Washington Post's magazine columnist Charles Trueheart on February 25, 1992, but it required Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson's sandbagging of Brock's book in the New Yorker fifteen months later to give it everlasting life. Whereupon it was taken up by the likes of Ellen Goodman, Molly Ivins, Michael Kinsley, National Public Radio , even Howard Kurtz [who used it twice in one piece, and in the wake of Troopergate seemed to attribute it to Bob Tyrrell, as did Esquire magazine unambiguously, not to mention all those people at the New York Times. Journalists as far away as Dublin, Glasgow, and London have cited it. An apologist for Jimmy Carter has used it. Irked by Brock's successes on other fronts, Goodman and Ivins have joined Frank Rich and Anthony Lewis as repeat offenders. Goodman now erroneously says the phrase is found in the book, while Ivins risked censure by Dr. Bracey for calling Brock "that foul little right -wing reporter." Never, ever has any of these geniuses confessed to any greater familiarity with Brock's work on Hill. And what did Brock actually write in that original story: "So Hill may be a bit nutty, and a bit slutty, but is she an outright liar?" Only one journalist got it right, the Washington Times's John Elvin, who thought it a fair question in view of the flurry of Hill-related facts reported by Brock--which I might add no one has yet refuted, or even attempted to refute.<<