Topic: Media Research Center
If ever there was any doubt that the Media Research Center is first and foremost a vehicle for Brent Bozell's right-wing activism, he erased it by using the MRC to go on a tirade against Republican Sen. Jeff Flake.
Bozell gave himself space at NewsBusters to personally attack Flake over his new book:
On behalf of my late father and my family, I am denouncing Senator Jeff Flake and his new book, dishonestly titled, Conscience of a Conservative.
Since entering the Senate in 2013, Jeff Flake has, time and again, proven he is part of the indulgent hypocrisy in Washington. While he waxes poetically about conservative principles, his Conservative Review Liberty score is an abysmal 53%, also known as: “F”. In 2013, I watched first-hand as Flake refused to sign a letter pledging to defund ObamaCare, among his many betrayals to conservatism. Jeff Flake is neither a conservative nor does he have a conscience.
As every conservative leader knows, my father, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., ghost-wrote Conscience of a Conservative for Barry Goldwater. While the Goldwater Institute may own the rights to the book’s title, neither the organization nor Senator Flake have the right to unjustifiably trade on my father’s work. Conscience of a Conservative is the greatest selling polemic in history, and Senator Flake is trading on its reputation to shamelessly promote himself and disguise his own conservative deficiencies. My father would be appalled to see this fraud as the author of the so-called “sequel,” which it most certainly is not.
The media need to know, when reporting on Senator Flake and his “book,” that the author is a deceiver out for personal and financial gain. I also call on my conservative brethren to denounce this impostor, who dishonorably claims to speak for conservatism, in the strongest possible terms.
(Increasingly lackey-ish blogger Craig Bannister dutifully repeats Bozell's rant at his "news" division, CNSNews.com.)
First: Who is Bozell to judge who is conservative and who is not? Remember that Bozell loudly insisted that Donald Trump was no conservative, until he suddenly decided otherwise (perhaps influenced the MRC's biggest donor, who is also a big Trump supporter). If Bozell can be turned that easily, he's obviously no stalwart of bedrock conservative principles.
Second: Bozell sets up Flake as a RINO strawman to attack. Flake's conservative credentials are much more solid than Bozell portrays them; he simply cherry-picked a score from the website operated by his buddy, Mark Levin, that curiously fails to explain how those scores come about beyond a video vaguely stating that they are computed from "50 votes over a six-year period." And as the Wsahington Post points out (and Bozell omits), "Flake has a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, 95 percent from FreedomWorks, 100 percent from National Right to Life and an 'A' from the National Rifle Association."
Third: That Bozell is rushing to the defense of his father in this way tells us he's still trying to ride the coattails of his father's achievements, and that he would never have gone as far in the conservative movement as he has if his father hadn't ghost-wrote Goldwater's book.
The fact that Bozell is so willing to smear and lie about Flake -- and treat his nonprofit organization as an angsty personal blog in order to do so -- is a pretty clear sign that he's afraid of the anti-Trump message in Flake's book that indicts people like him for abandoning self-professed conservative principles to align with Trump.
