-Caveat Lector-
Miami New Times
June 28, 2001, Thursday
The Drudge Retort
Democrats hate him. Journalists scorn him. Most Americans ignore him. Which
is fine with Matt Drudge. He's taking it to the bank.
BYLINE: Brett Sokol
Miami Beach appears to be treating Matt Drudge well. The man who fearfully
barricaded himself inside his Hollywood, California, apartment for five
days as his Drudge Report Website helped unleash the Monica Lewinsky affair
upon the world hardly looks like a reclusive shut-in. Instead 34-year-old
Drudge, as he enters Nirvana, a South Beach Indian restaurant, appears tan,
rested, and just a hair short of buff. His trademark hard-boiled fashion
affectations, which nodded to Twenties gossip reporter Walter Winchell --
vintage fedora, button-down shirt, loosened tie -- have been replaced by a
faded T-shirt, a Guatemalan peasant-chic necklace, shorts, and sneakers. He
still spends the bulk of his day hunched in front of his computer screen,
surfing newspaper sites and wire services, sifting through thousands of
e-mails. But now these online sessions are broken up by frequent dips in
the Atlantic Ocean -- just steps from the $352,000 high-rise Beach condo he
rents."I've been avoiding you," he says with a mischievous smirk, referring
to the previous two weeks' worth of unanswered phone calls and e-mail
requests for an interview. Settling in at a corner table, he remains wary.
After a few questions about his new life in Miami Beach, he begins wagging
his finger sternly: "I know your angle. I can see where you're going with
this. Drudge the conservative rebel'; the conservative who's not really
that conservative.'"
He continues sharply: "That's not true. I am a conservative. I'm very much
pro-life. If you go down the list of what makes up a conservative, I'm
there almost all the way. So just because I like Junior Vasquez doesn't
mean I can't believe this country was built on life, not on a death
culture."
Hold on. Junior Vasquez? Junior Vasquez, the reigning DJ king of gay
circuit parties?
"Oh yeah, last year Vasquez did some of his best stuff ever," Drudge
enthuses, launching into an informed rundown of house music's leading
lights, praising Peter Rauhoffer and Hex Hector but deeming a recent
all-night set from Danny Tenaglia at Club Space "a bit overrated." He's
even more displeased with Thunderpuss, the duo who have moved from sweaty
club faves such as "If It Don't Fit, Don't Force It" and the less oblique
"Fuck Me Harder" to remixing chart hits from the likes of Madonna and
Enrique Iglesias. "Thunderpuss is gone, completely finished," he declares.
"Their past three or four records have been a debacle."
So meet Matt Drudge, staunch conservative, self-described soldier in the
fight against the louche Clintonistas, passionate devotee of circuit house,
and -- he notes with his spoon poised in the air -- a big fan of Nirvana's
mulligatawny soup."This is all you're gonna get," Drudge admonishes New
Times photographer Steve Satterwhite, instructing him to snap only head
shots. It's nothing personal, he explains from behind a pair of dark
sunglasses, posing inside his 27th-floor apartment as a breathtaking view
of the Atlantic unfolds through the floor-to-ceiling windows around him. "I
just feel really left alone in Miami," he says, which is the way he'd like
to keep it. So no unmasked eyes, no identifying full-body photos, and
definitely no mentioning his exact street address. Drudge's apartment emits
the vibe of a bachelor stockbroker's pad, someone with plenty of money but
little free time to bask in it. The living room is largely empty and
undecorated except for a massive television set. Personal effects are few:
a Larry King videotape, a boom box for listening to tapes of talk-radio
prankster Phil Hendrie, and scattered copies of his own best-selling book,
Drudge Manifesto. Despite having lived here for two years, unpacked moving
boxes still sit stacked against a wall.
Initial speculation surrounding Drudge's move to Miami had him covering his
assets. Looming large was a $30 million libel lawsuit brought by Clinton
White House aide Sidney Blumenthal after Drudge posted on his Website
allegations that Blumenthal "has a spousal-abuse past that has been
effectively covered up."
A Florida law exempts one's home from most legal judgments or bankruptcy
settlements -- the apparent lure for fellow California refugee O.J.
Simpson.
But Drudge insists (and Miami-Dade County records confirm) that he owns no
property beyond the Mustang convertible that has replaced his old Geo
Metro. Forget about Blumenthal, says Drudge. "It was the tax-free zone --
there's no state income tax here. I started making seven digits last year,
and my $600-a-month apartment would end up costing me $90,000 in California
if I would've stayed. It didn't make any sense to pay nine percent income
tax. To then have blackouts on top of it is ridiculous!"
Besides, the lawsuit was settled in May, with Blumenthal not only dropping
matters completely but actually cutting Drudge's lawyer a check for $2500
to cover some travel expenses. Though he crowed to the New York Times that
the publicity from the lawsuit had rocketed him "from rags to riches -- and
I got to keep them," his mood today isn't one of vindication. "They went
out of their way to cover this lawsuit really aggressively, but it didn't
come down the way they wanted it to," he says, pointing to the relative
silence from major media outlets following the settlement's announcement.
"There was nine seconds from Judy Woodruff on CNN after probably a couple
of hours discussion on the lawsuit."
After two days of fuming, Drudge announced on his Website: "AFTER YEARS OF
COVERAGE: BIG MEDIA SILENT ON BLUMENTHAL CASH SETTLEMENT," charging that
"New York Times readers have been left with the impression that the lawsuit
against Drudge is ongoing and will continue forever until Mr. Blumenthal is
victorious."
Only a few hours later, Drudge posted an e-mail inquiry he received from
New York Times media reporter Felicity Barringer asking to speak with him.
And while he remains aggrieved that the resulting piece was barely more
than 200 words, he boasts, "You try getting the New York Times to write
about you only a couple hours after you've posted Why aren't you writing
about me?'" Drudge may not want to be physically recognized, but as the
Times episode demonstrates, he is obsessed with being known. In fact each
morning begins with him logging on to Nexis -- a voluminous worldwide
newspaper and records database -- to check on the latest appearances of his
own name. "I love it when I pop up in the Jakarta Times," he quips.
Today offers a special treat beyond the daily use of his name as an
adjective ("Drudgelike"): proof of his entrance into the cultural lexicon.
He taps a few keys and brings up his first mention by a Bush White House
official on the public record. Back in January Drudge had helped advance
charges from Bush officials about outgoing Clinton staffers sabotaging
their offices. The damage originally was purported to be little more than
some magic-marker graffiti and a few missing W keys from some computer
keyboards -- a playful scene similar to the mess left by departing Papa
Bush staffers in January 1993. The Drudge Report trumpeted otherwise:
"WHITE HOUSE OFFICES LEFT TRASHED': PORN BOMBS, LEWD MESSAGES; LEGAL PROBE
CONSIDERED." Several publications, as well as a host of conservative talk
shows, ran with the vandalism story.
But a General Services Administration investigation later found that the
"property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when
tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." A separate
General Accounting Office inquiry also concluded there was "no record of
damage." Confronted with this evidence at a press briefing by several
reporters who believed they'd been deceived, White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer could do little more than stammer and backpedal. He'd been
misunderstood; he certainly never accused Clinton staffers of any serious
West Wing malfeasance. "Somebody was chasing Matt Drudge in the press corps
here,"
Fleischer offered, "and Matt Drudge had put something up that said a full
investigation had been launched by the White House.... I was trying to
knock that down." Refuting Drudge was the only reason he'd brought the
vandalism matter up at a previous press briefing.
One would imagine that Drudge would feel a little sheepish about being
proven wrong, not to mention being used as a scapegoat by his erstwhile
allies in the White House. Even more embarrassing, here was a dramatic
example of exactly what his critics have accused him of doing: moving a
politically motivated rumor from GOP circles out into the daily news cycle,
regardless of its veracity. Despite all this, staring at his computer
screen and taking in his boldfaced name in a transcript of Fleischer's
comments, Drudge seems pleased simply to have been mentioned. It's
confirmation that he still matters, that he's still a player in Washington
circles, even if his relationship to the Bush administration is a bit
ambiguous. After all, it's a lot harder to play the role of rebel outsider
when your man now sits in the Oval Office
"Bush is not good copy," he sighs, then adds with a raised eyebrow: "But
his daughters might be." He continues musing aloud. "I say this as a
conservative: Bush is so completely boring. There just aren't any angles
there whatsoever. Between Bush and Al Gore, there's probably not much of a
difference. At least not yet. Gore would've probably given a little better
copy."
That's a jarring statement -- most liberals and conservatives alike would
insist there's a world of difference between Gore and Bush, that it
certainly matters who won the election, that the ability to generate "copy"
is no way to evaluate the nation's leader. But good copy means good
ratings.
And for Drudge, ratings appear to be what it's all about.Although Matt
Drudge's name might be forever linked with Hillary Clinton's famously
branded "vast right-wing conspiracy" to bring down her husband's
presidency, his formative years were anything but political. A mock "last
will and testament" written shortly before his 1984 Washington, D.C., high
school graduation captures the mindset of an angst-ridden teen who couldn't
care less about the Beltway."To my only true friend Ms. thing, Vicky B,"
Drudge wrote, "I leave a night in Paris, a bottle of Chaps cologne, and
hope you find a school with original people. And to everyone else who has
helped and hindered me whether it be staff or students, I leave a penny for
each day I've been here and cried here. A penny rich in worthless memories.
For worthless memories is what I have endured."
The next few years were scarcely more auspicious. Eschewing college, Drudge
spent a month kicking around Paris, a year in New York City working at a
supermarket, and then returned home to Washington, D.C., where he punched
the clock as night-shift manager for a suburban 7-Eleven. Eventually Drudge
made his way to Hollywood, looking for a job in the entertainment industry.
The closest he came to the glamorous life, however, was working in the CBS
studios gift shop, folding T-shirts and dusting off 60 Minutes mugs. It was
a job he would hold for seven years.
"My father worried I was in a giant stall," he said during a speech before
a June 1998 meeting of the National Press Club. "And in a parental panic he
overcame his fear of flying and dropped in for a visit. At the end of his
stay, during the drive to the airport, sensing some action was called for,
he dragged me into a blown-out strip mall on Sunset Boulevard and found a
Circuit City store. Come on,' he said desperately, I'm getting you a
computer.'
" Oh yeah, and what am I going to do with that?' I laughed. "I collected a
few e-mail addresses of interest," Drudge recalled of his initial 1995
forays onto the Internet, and the Drudge Report debuted as a string of
juicy news articles he collected, then e-mailed to a small following. "One
reader turned into 5, then turned into 100. And faster than you could say,
I never had sex with that woman,' it was 1000, 5000, 100,000 people. The
ensuing Website launched itself."
The end result was a starkly designed, link-studded site that mixed
Hollywood gossip with Capitol Hill buzz. Considering the tenor of the
times, it wasn't an odd juxtaposition. Supermarket tabloids such as the
Star and the National Enquirer were then competing with daily newspapers
for dirt on President Clinton.
Six years later the formula endures: Links to stories detailing the latest
drug arrest of actor Robert Downey, Jr., and opening-weekend box-office
speculation on Pearl Harbor compete for space with Timothy McVeigh
execution coverage and Senator Jeffords's bolt from the GOP. The blend is
spiced up by the occasional Drudge-penned "exclusive."
"The reason I hit it big is because I got lucky with the president," Drudge
says. "But during all that Lewinsky stuff, I was doing great stories on
science, TV -- all of it. The Lewinsky stuff was getting big headlines, so
that's how I became defined." He notes that he's never shied away from a
good story on George W. Bush. "I had a great headline a year and a half
ago -- Bush: Whites Only -- about a racial covenant on a house Bush had
sold so no blacks could move into it." While Drudge bristles at the
perception he's one-dimensionally pro-Republican, mention of his protracted
"war" with Clinton draws a sparkle to his eyes. "When I look back on it, to
imagine that the president would be saying my name over and over again in
grand jury testimony, having that bounced around on satellites all over the
world -- it's pretty surreal," he recalls. "And it took just two fingers, a
modem, and guts." He then adds with a snarl: "And not giving a shit!"
That sentiment is precisely what alarmed many in the media, particularly
when Drudge made headlines in August 1997 with his spousal-abuse
allegations against journalist Sidney Blumenthal. Reading the Drudge Report
at home before his first day on the job as a Clinton advisor, Blumenthal
reacted with outrage, and Drudge admitted soon afterward to the Washington
Post there was no substance to the story. He said he'd been used by "top
GOP operatives" to carry out a character assassination, adding ruefully: "I
think I've been had." Blumenthal remained unmoved and filed his
well-publicized $30 million libel lawsuit, claiming not only a desire to
defend his family's honor but the very craft of journalism itself. " Drudge
is a menace to honest, responsible journalism," concurred Newsweek's
Michael Isikoff, who had already seen several of his sources on a purported
Clinton-Kathleen Willey sex story leak material to Drudge. "And to the
extent that he's read and people believe what they read, he's dangerous."
An important subtext to all this is the realization that a good five months
before Monica Lewinsky became a household name, Drudge -- flying solo out
of his tiny Hollywood apartment with nothing more than a home computer --
already was being read regularly throughout Washington's corridors of
power.
"They engaged me in a fight, and the Blumenthal lawsuit just exploded it,"
he marvels. "To know people in the White House are reading the Drudge
Report!" Or as he crowed to the National Press Club: "If I'm so bad and if
I'm so useless and I'm just a gossip hound, why was Sidney Blumenthal
reading me the night before his first day at the White House? I don't quite
understand that. It seems to me I'd spend my time over at the New York
Times, who get everything right."
If Blumenthal's intention was to financially destroy Drudge, President
Clinton's enemies gleefully rose to the challenge, providing the online
muckraker with a pro bono legal defense crew. The New York Observer's Joe
Conason and former Newsweek general editor Gene Lyons, in their The Hunting
of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary
Clinton, describe those presidential enemies as "a loose cabal, if not
quite a vast conspiracy,' involving long-time Clinton adversaries from
Arkansas and elsewhere: an angry gallery of defeated politicians,
disappointed office seekers, right-wing pamphleteers, wealthy eccentrics,
zany private detectives, religious fanatics, and die-hard segregationists
who went beyond mere sexual gossip to promote rumors of financial
chicanery, narcotics trafficking, and even politically motivated murder."
Among that network's ranks were colorful characters such as Nixon-era dirty
trickster-turned-literary agent Lucianne Goldberg and American Spectator
editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., as well as the funding largesse of notorious
Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. This close-knit group jumped
from issue to issue -- Travelgate, Troopergate, Whitewater, Vince Foster,
Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones -- looking for something,
anything, with which to undermine the Clinton administration.
With its growing public profile, the Drudge Report became a useful weapon.
Conason and Lyons point to white-shoe attorney Bruce Conway and
conservative pundit Ann Coulter, both part of the Paula Jones legal team,
as the source for many of the presidential tidbits that flowed to Drudge.
Some were goofily false (Clinton has a black love child; Clinton has a
bald-eagle tattoo on his privates), but at least one was shockingly true.
Conway and Coulter had been leaking Jones deposition material about a young
White House intern to Newsweek reporter Isikoff, who was hot on the Clinton
sex trail. When Newsweek editors decided on a Saturday night to hold the
story from that Monday's issue (they wanted more evidence than third-party
telephone conversations), Conway and Coulter turned to Drudge. Several
hours later, on Sunday, January 18, 1998, the Drudge Report posted this
headline:
"NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN. BLOCKBUSTER REPORT:
23-YEAR-OLD FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT.
WORLD EXCLUSIVE.
The Drudge Report has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the
story of his career, only to have it spiked by top Newsweek suits hours
before publication...."For more than a million devoted fans, the Drudge
Report isn't just a Website, it's also a radio show. Drudge leads the way
into one of his apartment's smaller rooms, which serves as a studio. Aside
from a desk littered with the cassette tapes that contain his show's
backing music, a microphone, and a brick-size telephone coupler, the only
other object of note is a framed blowup of an October 2000 New York Times
best-seller list. The placement of Drudge Manifesto is circled."They
stopped me at number eight," he grouses, noting that he still managed to
sell 100,000 copies (a paperback edition is due this fall). They, of
course, are the liberal media elite, conspiring once again to silence him.
"They get to define who's hot and who's not? Well, I declare they're not
hot. All of them! They don't have to cover me; they don't have to review my
book --
which got four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list without a
review anywhere really but the Washington Post."
Perhaps that Times blowup and its reminder of his underdog status help
Drudge to psych up before turning on his microphone every Sunday evening at
10:00. At that moment -- via satellite uplink and an engineer in a New York
City station -- he begins preaching to his fans on 157 talk-radio stations
around the nation. (According to Arbitron, more than 16,000 people tune in
to hear him on Miami's WIOD-AM 610.) Sunday evening has traditionally been
considered a graveyard slot by radio executives, and Drudge's development
of a significant audience there hasn't gone unnoticed or unrewarded; his
six-figure radio paycheck provides the bulk of his current income. If
there's something ironic about this booster of the Internet revolution
finding success on such an old-school medium, it's lost on Drudge. In fact
he takes great pleasure in the dot-com crash. "I see all these media
corporations pulling back from their Websites, saying, Oh, there's no money
in it. Retreat!' The audience is still there; there's lots of eyeballs. The
Internet has just failed as a commercial, corporate, bottom-line medium.
But who said it had to be that?"
He's certainly had his disputes with those media corporations. A yearlong
stint hosting a TV cable show on Fox News came to an end with Drudge crying
censorship -- at the hands of archconservative Rupert Murdoch no less. ABC
radio, the original syndicator of his radio show, terminated its
relationship with him late last year. Executives in the ABC news department
were uncomfortable with the association and reportedly prevailed upon the
network not to renew Drudge's contract.
For Eric Rhoads, publisher of the trade journal Radio Ink, these conflicts
are not surprising. "I can understand why a company like ABC, which is
always very concerned with the credibility of its news, would be concerned
about tying in with Matt," he remarks. "But most stations are just going to
say, Look, if it gets ratings and we can make money on it, it's
worthwhile.'"
Accordingly Drudge wasn't orphaned for long. Premiere Radio Networks, a
division of media titan Clear Channel Communications and home to top-rated
Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura, swooped in to grab him. "The hosts who
traditionally have been the most successful are not wishy-washy," Rhoads
says. "They're very dogmatic in their content. That's why Rush has been so
successful. Whether or not you agree with him, very firm opinions lead to
great ratings."
But the radio persona of Matt Drudge is not exactly a younger version of
Rush Limbaugh, despite a clear overlap in the two men's audiences. Most
callers to Drudge merely parrot what they've already heard on Limbaugh's
show (even down to stock epithets like "limousine liberals"), endlessly
rehashing familiar talk-show fodder: the death penalty, Timothy McVeigh
conspiracies, unchecked immigration, the "socialist" nature of the
Democratic Party leadership. "The callers are boring," Drudge admits with a
shrug, an attitude that comes through on the air.
What truly excites Drudge, what elevates his radio monologues to a caustic
pitch, is the media itself. "Okay, Clinton's gone," he says, "but my new
rage is AOL-Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin. He thinks he's the most powerful
man in the world. And he might be! Anyone who controls that many images,
that much information, that much product, and has grand designs for
societal good,' I'm onto him!"
Levin is but one of Drudge's favored targets. On the air recently he also
cackled as he recited the minuscule ratings of several cable-news programs;
he reveled in a New Yorker story that quoted a former Inside.com staffer
claiming the site never achieved more than 1200 paying subscribers despite
a $35 million budget; he clucked in disgust at both Gore Vidal's plans for
a McVeigh execution profile for Vanity Fair and that magazine's editor,
Graydon Carter, for offering Vidal a forum.
These fevered rants evidence Drudge's fascination with the world of "Tina"
and "Harvey" (in insiderspeak, no "Brown," "Weinstein," or titles are
necessary), but how many conservative-minded radio listeners share that
interest? "It's just a hunch I have," Drudge says, "that these media people
are better copy than Bush." And while he concedes that his fans may not
monitor Salon.com's Jake Tapper and Inside.com's Kurt Andersen to the
obsessive degree he does, they certainly enjoy his tirades on those
figures.
"For two of the last three ratings books, I was number one in New York City
in my time slot ," he says proudly, referring to his Arbitron-measured
audience of more than 100,000 there. " On Sunday nights there is no other
voice on AM or FM -- music, talk, jazz, classical, hip-hop -- that has a
bigger audience. So obviously people are getting it.'" And if they do
stray, there's always Janet Reno. "I'm going to go to Little Havana and
wear a Reno for Governor' T-shirt," he laughs. Not that he plans to vote
for her, but as a lightning rod for conservative animus, "she's great
copy." Beyond Reno, though, don't expect to hear much about Miami on the
radio or the Website. "I don't write about Miami politics for the same
reason I don't write about Giuliani's divorce in New York: It doesn't
interest me enough. I know that's self-serving, living here and not caring
what's happening on my own street. But tough, that's the American way."
Drudge has enough faith in his instincts to believe that if he's interested
in a subject, so will his audience be interested. Keeping that audience
glued to his Website and radio show remains paramount. Some critics might
argue that such a ratings-driven philosophy is less about journalism than
it is about tabloid-style pandering. "Who says that?" Drudge snaps. "The
establishment press? Those people are fools to think they own the tradition
of journalism. It's all about nobodies like me, upstarts, people who dig
into a lot of things on their own.
"Look, I know what journalists think of me: that I'm an uneducated fool who
was working in a gift shop and hit it big. And there's nothing they can do
about that. I get e-mails all the time: Help me, I'm sixteen years old. I
don't want to go college; I want to be like you.'"To be like Matt Drudge is
no simple thing, at least no simple-minded thing. A lengthy lunch
conversation only underscores his iconoclastic nature. A case in point: his
attraction to pop culture, a subject most conservative commentators either
fear or deem to be beneath them. When was the last time you heard Rush
Limbaugh talk about the new Radiohead album?Despite overcast weather,
Drudge slides on his sunglasses for the drive down to Lincoln Road's Van
Dyke Café. He appears visibly tense, remarking that with the
exception of shopping expeditions to the Wild Oats supermarket on Alton
Road, "this is as far south as I go." He glances around apprehensively as
he sits at his table, but as time passes, he appears disappointed no one at
the Van Dyke recognizes him.
A similar ambivalence marks his feelings toward his own profession. Drudge
has little affinity for other marquee conservative pundits, particularly
those often held up as kindred maverick spirits. His take on P.J. O'Rourke,
hipster libertarian? "Hip? P.J. O'Rourke?" he scoffs. "I don't know how
anybody gets through those things he writes for Rolling Stone." How about
Tucker Carlson, the golden boy recently tapped as the new voice of the
right for CNN's Crossfire? Drudge rolls his eyes and offers a dismissive
wave, as if he can't even be bothered to comment. Is it that Carlson is too
moderate?
Is it his suspenders? "He's boring," Drudge barks.
So who does he enjoy? "Who do I read? Outside of what I'm working on,
nobody." He adds with a grin: "I'm like George Bush." When pressed,
however, he surprisingly names liberal stalwarts such as the Nation's Eric
Alterman ("I agree with the Nation on trade -- and so does Pat Buchanan")
and the New York Times's Maureen Dowd ("though I'd never admit it in
public").
Further complicating the Drudge portrait are his stream-of-consciousness
jeremiads on media monopolies and his support of the violent
anti-globalization street protesters who shut down Seattle in 1999. What
begins to emerge is a philosophy that is less traditionally conservative
than populist. A hint of its origin can be found in his affection for dance
culture.
Drudge speaks fondly of frequent teenage visits to an aunt living in New
York City; he had immersed himself in the early and mid-Eighties downtown
club scene before he'd even finished high school. He recalls listening to
legendary DJ Frankie Crocker on WBLS-FM and late nights at Danceteria and
the Roxy, where races, sexualities, and musical genres all bumped up and
ground against one another. Chestnuts from that era often turn up on his
radio show as closing theme songs.
In a recent issue of New York magazine, columnist Michael Wolff talked of
two nations coming into focus before us. There is a schism between "the
quicker-growing, economically vibrant, but also more fractious and more
difficult to manage, morally relativist, urban-oriented, culturally
adventuresome, sexually polymorphous, and ethnically diverse nation (Bill
Clinton's America, if you will). And there's the small-town,
nuclear-family, religiously oriented, white-centric other America, which
makes up for its diminishing cultural and economic force with its
predictability and stability (the GWB-ies)."
New York's downtown milieu left a lasting imprint on most people who passed
through it, and while the experience may not have transformed them into
flaming revolutionaries, it usually left them comfortably within "Bill
Clinton's America" and injected a healthy fear of the "GWB-ies." To hear
Drudge throw in his ideological lot with the latter tribe simply seems
unfathomable, particularly when he glides from effusive praise of
borderline reactionary Georgia Rep. Bob Barr to singing the lyrics of the
house classic "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" -- a veritable gay-nightclub
anthem. Drudge says there's no inherent conflict. "I take this music
seriously," he insists. "In fact I take this music so seriously that I
don't want to see some shirtless freak tweaking. That kind of ruins it for
me -- club music is the classical music of our age."
Drudge may embrace the music, but he refuses to embrace its explicit gay,
black roots, a refusal that has prompted controversy in the past. MSNBC
correspondent Jeannette Walls, in her book Dish: The Inside Story on the
World of Gossip, profiled Drudge as someone who "hung out with a crowd of
promiscuous, openly gay men and dated several of them." She interviewed one
purported ex-boyfriend, David Cohen, who recalled that " Drudge loved to do
wild, provocative things to draw attention to himself," including getting
tossed from one Washington, D.C., nightclub after tossing a full pitcher of
beer into the air.
After Dish's publication last year, Walls and Drudge traded insults via New
York City's gossip columns. Drudge claimed Walls's entire account was
fabricated: "Jeannette, dear, slow down and come up for some air. You are
becoming a laughingstock. Even by MSNBC standards."
In response Walls told the Daily News: "I'm not passing judgment. But I
think his duplicity is relevant to his character as someone who has built
his career on exposing other's private lives." Contacted by phone recently,
Walls reiterated that both she and her publisher, HarperCollins,
"absolutely stand by every word I've said." She also said Cohen has offered
to sign an affidavit attesting to his comments.
At the mention of Walls's book, Drudge turns visibly angry, characterizing
Dish as nothing less than an attempt to spike his career. "I go to bars,"
he explains with a perturbed edge. "I go to straight bars, I go to gay
bars.
Walls never said there was sex; she said there was dating. She never had
enough to go that far."
Does it bother Drudge to be portrayed in the media as gay? "No, because I'm
not," he answers firmly. "But I'm not going to be a Bert Fields and sue
people for $100 million for printing this stuff," he adds, referring to Tom
Cruise's attorney and his defamation lawsuit against a gay porn star who
claimed to have had a sexual relationship with the actor.
So does he fear a backlash from homophobic fans of his radio show and
Website? "It's not an issue with me," he replies, growing weary of the
topic. He leans back in his chair and opines, "I think I told the Daily
News something like, My youth is a blur.'" He laughs in self-appreciation:
"That's a good out."
For Drudge there's more at work here than "Is he or isn't he?" Questions
about his sexual orientation, he argues, simply are more examples of
liberals attempting to use culture, even dance culture, to advance their
agenda. "When did synthesizers married to a drum machine become a political
movement?" he asks in exasperation. "What does a Peter Rauhoffer
instrumental have to do with liberal values ? I haven't missed an issue of
Billboard in eighteen years, but I hate it when their columnists mix
phrases like club culture' with the dance scene. It's so phony; it's wrong.
It's a record. It's a record you play as you're mowing your lawn, swinging
on a swing. I don't understand why dance-music writers get so obsessed with
community.' Maybe it was AIDS, a sense of coming together of the
underground." He mutters that last word with obvious distaste.
"I think more people died of AIDS during Clinton than during either Reagan
or Bush," he continues. "I don't think there's anything a president can do
about AIDS , especially a president who is encouraging oral sex.... If we
all just have our pants down, if we follow our urges in everything we do,
society is going to go down."
END
=======================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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