Behind Enemy Lines

Scarborough took aim at Hollywood for all of America’s ills. And his own. When a technical difficulty marred one broadcast, he only half-yukked, “I think it proves that once again there is, in fact, a liberal conspiracy against conservatives in Hollywood. I thought I saw Rob Reiner and Janeane Garofalo pull the plug of our generator.”

He sandwiched Ashley Judd, Kelly Preston and that couple personifying celebrity excess, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, in between interviews with a wonderfully representative cross section of L.A. residents like Hugh Hefner (live from the Playboy mansion, where conservatives decried the very idea of Loretta Sanchez’s fund-raiser for Al Gore there during the 2000 campaign), Larry Flynt, magician Penn Jillette, Heidi Fleiss, a plastic surgeon, and Gloria Allred, who with Scarborough dwelled ad nauseum on Kobe Bryant’s disgrace.

Yet Scarborough himself has repeatedly been the subject of scandal. In 1997, he was part of the cabal of Republican congressmen that conspired to get rid of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House in 1997 in a dramatic coup attempt that failed.

Then, just after the recently divorced Scarborough announced he would be resigning his congressional seat, “The Other Chandra,” 28-year-old Lori Klausutis, turned up dead on July 20, 2001, in Scarborough’s Fort Walton Beach, Florida, office, where she worked. Just two months after Chandra Levy’s disappearance and connection to Modesto Representative Gary Condit, the Scarborough-Klausutis case received shockingly little news coverage. Even though the Florida coroner in the Klausutis case had a history of “shaky work” previously in Missouri, reported the New Times alternative newspaper Kansas City’s The Pitch.“Coroner Mike Berkland claimed he ’sectioned’ Klausitis’ brain during her autopsy to determine that her head was injured by a fall, not by a blow from a weapon. But that’s the same sort of claim that got Mike Berkland run out of Kansas City in 1996, after he’d falsely reported that he’d sectioned brains later found whole by his boss — a mistake he blames on poorly proofread reports written with computer macros.”

Scarborough whined at the time that liberal flamethrowers were out to get him. “Have you seen I’m a murderer? Do a Yahoo search, and . . . [t]he second and third sites will say that I got a staff member pregnant and killed her, that I was cheating on my first wife . . . Comparing me to Gary Condit.”

Poor Scarborough, the political war victim now victimizing Hollywood for being anti-war. Of course, no mention was made all week of show-biz legend Bob Hope, who went to the frontlines for his adopted country and deserved every drop of gushing praise he received the following Monday after his death and after Scarborough had high-tailed it back to safety. But we also know that the first casualty of this war has been the truth.

The victor in this skirmish, hypocrisy.

Contact Nikki Finke at deadlinehollywood@gmail.com.