After reading David Brock’s memoir Blinded by the Right a couple of years ago, I came away with the impression that right wing hatchet job writers were awash in filthy lucre. Before founding liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, Brock was a right wing junk journalist, specializing in character assassination and invective. He bounced from plum gig to plum gig at conservative magazines and think tanks, with fat paychecks provided by Clinton-hating gazillionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife.

Brock made being a conservative writer in the ‘90s seemed like the easiest, most lucrative writing gig in the world, aside from maybe being Steven King. Judging from recent bellyaching by conservative writers, it looks like things have gotten a little harder since.

This week, five conservative writers brought a lawsuit against the right wing publisher Regnery. The authors, whose books include Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security and Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror, claim that Regnery’s owners, Eagle Publishing, distributed books in ways that screwed their authors out of cash.

There’s something deeply satisfying for liberals about how the literary source of swift boating is getting screwed out of what he believes he deserves for screwing America out of having Bush as a single term president. But, as Jane at Firedoglake points out, there’s a lot of room for doubt about whether the swift boat dude or his cronies were getting screwed at all.

Without Regnery’s blanket exposure, authors like Richard Miniter (Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror) probably wouldn’t have been asked to appear on “1000 talk radio shows” or have become a “widely sought speaker” as Miniter claims he has on his Web site. Still, that doesn’t mean he’s above painting his publishers as commies for the New York Times.

Well, the simple answer to that question is that they’re acting that way because they are a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company. Well, maybe more of a vintage Bloom County cartoon; according to their Web site, Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak is on Eagle Publishing’s board of directors.