SIX DEGREES OF LLOYD GROVE

Lloyd Grove's recent attack on Brock was simply recycled from Matt "Coo Coo ca Choo" Drudge's site, without actual confirmation, and jazzed up with a few quotes from ex-pals of Brock. What's Grove's interest in this story?


Let's connect the dots.

To begin with, Grove gets quotes from R. Emmett Tyrrell ("Until now, I've been very cautious about what I've said about poor David because I didn't want to be responsible for driving him over the edge") and Barbara Ledeen ("[T]here had been suspicions that there had been something wrong for a while.")

Tyrell was David Brock's boss at the American Spectator when Brock was peddling bogus Troopergate stories and Anita Hill slanders.


Ledeen was a co-founder of the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), along with her friend Ricky Silberman.

The IWF exists to put an attractive face on anti-feminism, mostly devoting itself to trotting out career Conservative Movement women (oh, the irony) on TV to propogate the myth of what is in reality an almost non-existent national anti-feminism movement. I was unable to find the number of members they claim to have, but I've heard it rumored that they number less than a thousand. This is compared to the National Organization for Women's claimed 500,000. Any veteran media watcher knows that IWF members and their views are more than a little disproportionately represented on the talk shows, relative to their estimated membership.

IWF is funded by the sugardaddy of the VRWC, Richard Mellon Scaife .


Ricky Silberman is the wife of D.C. District Court Judge Laurence Silberman, card-carrying member of the VRWC and Ken Starr flunky.. Judge Silberman once declared that Clinton was "at war with the government."

As explained in David Brock's book, the Silbermans took him under their wings in his early days in Washington. They were instrumental in helping him to savage Anita Hill, first in the Spectator and then in The Real Anita Hill

This is unsurprising, since Ricky Silberman used to work for Clarence Thomas, whose nomination Hill almost derailed, at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In Brock's Blinded by the Right , Ricky Silberman astonishingly comes across even more obsessed with Anita Hill than Barbara "I am Hillary" Comstock was with Senator Clinton (but that's another story).

So, what about Grove ? Why would he stoop to piling on a man for (maybe) having a nervous breakdown? As MWO recently reported, Grove's current girlfriend is former IWF staffer Amy Holmes. Holmes is now a fairly high-ranking member of the vast army of conservative pundettes and has her own talk show, and prior to that she was an early recruit to the IWF and a Ledeen/Silberman protege.


Perhaps Grove should have recused himself from this one.

Maybe we should ask Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler.