Arianna Huffington has written a new book, "Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning America Back." It's pointless to debate Ms. Huffington's newfound ideology since there is no guarantee that between the time these words are typed and published she won't have embraced yet a different cause. According to the book, however, Huffington thinks that President Bush is a fanatic. And Don Rumsfeld is a fanatic. And so is Richard Perle. And so is Dick Cheney. Karl Rove is a fanatic, too. Tom Delay as well. Who are the fools? NASCAR dads, and I'm not sure why, nor do I care.

But I do care about one thing, it's instructive to note that when she left the conservative movement behind, Arianna Huffington forgot to pack the truth into her suitcase.

Huffington recounts a nightmare event for her, the "Conservative Summit" hosted by the National Review magazine back in early 1993. She tells how the event began "in bombastic style" when moderator Charlton Heston "smugly" announced he was "one of the most politically incorrect people" because he was "heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, married to the same woman for forty-nine years, and not the recipient of any entitlement of any kind." Horrors!

Yes, horrors. Huffington writes that she "listened with mounting horror to the speaker who preceded me, Brent Bozell ... As Bozell's hard-right homilies were paraded in front of ...an adoring crowd, I asked myself... "'Where is the nearest exit?'" Huffington took her turn "with trepidation" wondering how the audience that embraced the previous speakers' "harsh brand of conservatism" would greet her message of "true conservatism ... the biblical admonition that we shall be judged by what we do for the least among us," which I suspect means not driving SUVs.

In any event, Huffington is mystified. "The same conservative audience that gave a standing ovation to Bozell gave a standing ovation to me. We just appealed to different parts of their brains and their psyches."

Well, to paraphrase the commercial, there's truth and there's Not Exactly. The panel we were on that day had nothing to do with politics; the topic was Hollywood and pop culture. There was nothing substantially different in our speeches - we both called on Tinstletown to clean up its act -- which is why we both generated the same reception, and, if memory serves me right, that didn't include a standing ovation for either of us.

And one year after the "horror" of following me to the podium, Arianna Huffington made a $25,000 donation to my organization. (I must have solicited a different part of her brain and psyche.)

Then there's David Brock's new book, "The Republican Noise Machine." A friend asked me the other day if I'd read it. No I hadn't, I answered, and didn't intend to. Why read the words of a man who admittedly lied to conservatives and now is trying to earn a living lying about them? My friend's answer: Because this book is hilarious in its untruths; and besides, there is a whole section on you. Out of curiosity I picked it up to read the section on me, but once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. It is the worldview of a political movement that has lost its collective mind.

In his introduction Brock asserts that, "My view is that unchecked right-wing media power means that in the United States today, no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided." We have reached this state because a vast right wing conspiracy far more powerful than the conservative movement of yesteryear ("The Birchers and the Klan, and William Buckley and Phyllis Schlafly") has taken control of the media. He concludes the book with, "The situation I have described in "The Republican Noise Machine" is intolerable in a democracy."

The only thing intolerable is the book itself, a fuming, ranting, bizarre compendium of half-truths and no-truths sourced primarily by fringe radical left-wing activists to demonstrate that the Far Right (always with a capital "F" and capital "R") and its evil agenda have taken over the world. And if you think I'm exaggerating, consider who Brock cites, with gratitude, as some of his experts: atrios.blogspot.com, BuzzFlash.com, ConWebWatch.com, DailyHowler.com, MediaWhores-Online.com, MediaTransparency.org, Poyenter.org, rittenhouse.blogspot.com, rogerailes.blogspot.com; and let's not overlook Spinsanity.org, The-Hamster.com and scoobiedavis.blogspot.com.

So why did I read this intolerable book? Because it's just fun to learn how awful my conservative friends really are. I lost count how many times, and to how many people Brock attaches the label "racist, sexist and homophobic," but it's pretty safe to venture the guess he thinks everyone on the Right is. In fact, everyone on the conservative side is not just Far Right, we're just pure evil.

Ann Coulter is "fanatical," marked by "manifest dishonesty and racial bigotry." Peggy Noonan "is not content simply to breach journalistic rules and stretch the truth." Robert Novak "still churns out prodigious amounts of tendentious copy... On cable, Novak could be looser with the facts than he was in print, mischaracterizing and lying routinely." George Will is "every bit the dishonest attack dog that Novak was." Bill O'Reilly "misinforms his viewers with astonishing regularity," which is better, I suppose, than Rush Limbaugh, whose "broadcasts are especially hate-filled" and who is - yup - "racist, sexist and homophobic." David Limbaugh gets honorable mention as "Rush Limbaugh's parasitic brother."

P.J. O'Rourke is a "gay basher," but Phyllis Schlafly trumps him as a "sexist gay basher." She is also a "book banner" who nonetheless condemns books "for failing to include the views of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan." The late William Simon was a "radical free marketer" who simultaneously "did not believe in a free, unfettered, and fair press." Paul Weyrich is a "forbidding demagogue" whose views are "rooted in a kind of populist nativism which often verges on racism." Pat Robertson publicly "has wished for the deaths of three justices." Anti-communist activist Jack Wheeler is a "deranged right-winger" and Grover Norquist derives his "inspirations on strategy and tactics from Communist thinkers," while Reed Irvine was associated with "former military and intelligence officers, Latin American death squad assassins, assorted Fascist and Nazi terrorist war criminals."

Beginning to see the picture? We really are a nasty bunch of fellows.

And conservative or conservative-leaning organizations are no better, you know. Citizens for a Sound Economy is "an antiregulation front group funded by top industrial polluters." The "Weekly Standard" prints "scurrilous insinuations." Accuracy In Media's research "was sloppy; its reporting was phony; and its facts, when checked, were shown to be flat wrong." The Drudge Report "has been at the forefront of smears." Brock's former employer, The Washington Times, "provides a forum for thinly veiled racism" while his other former employer, The American Spectator, was "leading anti-Clinton smear factory for the right wing." The Institute for Educational Affairs funded - oh boy, here we go again - "racist, sexist, homophobic right wing newspapers," one of which presumably was the "blatantly racist, sexist and homophobic [Dartmouth] Review."

But I'm digressing. This article is supposed to be about me. Brock devotes several pages documenting why I'm the second-most "intemperate and [un] trustworthy" person on the planet (David Horowitz claims the prize), but his expose on me is a good microcosm of this book: a journalistic high dive into the shallow end of the pool.

For starters the research is just plain sloppy. Among other things, I am not, and never have been, an "adviser" to the National Right to Life Committee. The Media Research Center doesn't publish MediaWatch, which was discontinued in 1999. My salary is not what he states. Nelson Bunker Hunt is not a donor to the MRC. And my father married my mother Patricia, not my Aunt Priscilla, a clarification that will surely comfort them both.

Brock wants the world to believe my organization, the Media Research Center, is a prime mover in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and cites at great lengths a speech I gave to the Heritage Foundation in 1992 as the Rosetta Stone of evidence. Brock claims that in this speech "Bozell loudly announced his conservative partisanship," and "explained that the organization was not seeking to pressure the media to be objective, a standard based on facts and truth by which the conservatives could come up short. Its goal was 'balance,' a standard that required the reportage of different views in equal measure with no regard for their veracity."

If it were true that I have no regard for veracity I'd be a researcher for David Brock. What exactly did I say in that speech? I urged conservatives to acknowledge their own biases: "Conservatives who denounce the liberal press in the name of objectivity are as misleading as the pundits they condemn." Pretty radical stuff, that.

Did my speech suggest media objectivity is not a goal because "conservatives could come up short," and that balance, "with no regard to veracity," is? Here are my exact words (which he chose not to cite) and you can decide: "Human nature being what it is, there is no such thing as pure objectivity. To be sure, objectivity is what the media ought to strive for, but the best way to achieve it is through balanced journalism."

A study the MRC conducted after the Columbine massacre proving the liberal media's pro-gun control tilt is dismissed because the study was conducted after Columbine meaning - well, I don't really know. A study we did proving the pro-Castro tilt of CNN is rejected because we didn't include Headline News or CNN International. Studies we've produced showing the liberal proclivities of reporters based on their on-air pronouncements are rejected because we didn't count politicians' sounds bites.

On and on it goes. If a conservative finds snow in the Alps, the conservative was keeping - hiding! - from the public the heat wave in Death Valley. That's your mindset when you rely on experts like MediaWhoresOnLine and scoobiedavis.blogspot.com, whatever that is. So what's a conservative to do with books like "Fanatics and Fools" and "The Republican Noise Machine"? Get them and read them at Starbucks, on an airplane, in some snooty bookstore reading room - anywhere liberals can see you publicly laughing at their new heroes. But by all means don't buy the books. Be a good conservative. Steal them.