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I doubt there’s a truly thoughtful person alive today who mourns the death of one of radical conservatism’s supporters — Richard Mellon Scaife. Focus on that middle name first, because that’s the family and the money that made him possible. A radical crank and one of the most vicious political funders, he paid the Republican party to attack its opposition personally.
This was Mellon money, more’s the pity — money that earlier went to support universities, libraries, cultural institutions. But not in little Richard’s hands.
… Unlike high-profile billionaires trying to influence politics today such as the Koch Brothers, Scaife put his greatest energy not into persuading the public that Republicans should be elected and that conservative policy ideas were correct but into destroying Bill Clinton personally, even if it required some unusually distasteful means. Scaife funded and helped direct the “Arkansas Project,” which set about to find (and if necessary, sort of invent) dirt on Bill Clinton’s time in Arkansas. Its most direct success was a magazine story about Bill Clinton’s sexual history with women other than his wife, which included a reference to a woman identified only as “Paula,” who turned out to be Paula Jones, who ended up suing Clinton, leading to a deposition in which Monica Lewinsky’s name came up, which led to impeachment.
That’s not to mention all the other charges of varying degrees of nuttiness that were aimed at Clinton, including that he murdered his friend Vince Foster (among other people; some believed Clinton had literally dozens of his political enemies in Arkansas rubbed out) and that he ran a drug-running operation out of a small airport in a town called Mena. What was so different about the Clinton years was not that there was an opposition research effort mounted against him as a candidate (that had happened before) but that even after he was elected, it didn’t stop or even decelerate. The election itself was just one battle in a longer war that could be won if the right personal information were found that could take the president down. ...PaulWaldman,Wonkblog
Waldman points out that the right has been more careful in their handling of Obama because, having suffered from a backlash over their Clinton vendetta, they think an all-out effort to impeach Obama could leave them in the dust. Or would leave them in the dust, for sure.
Waldman’s obit of the awful Mr. Scaife seems peculiarly relevant to this citizen right now. I’ve been reading Lynne Olson’s fascinating history of the lead-up to World War II and the struggle in America between the isolationists — some of whom were open admirers of Hitler and Nazi Germany — and the interventionists. I picked it up because of the reviews and because it opens some windows on family history. But most of all the book is intriguing thanks to Olson’s vivid depiction of conservatives v. progressives, a fight that’s been repeated over and over again as the radical right flows and ebbs over the 20th and 21st centuries.
We have been living a string of repeats of the bitterness during the run-up to World War in 1940-1 ever since Goldwater’s candidacy, then during the Reagan presidency/Gingrich House, and onward to Washington in the wake of the Bush disasters and during the Obama administration. So much of the rightwing fight is fought and refought with little variation and always stoked by ignorance and media. And in the background is always a kind of paranoia, not to mention a consistent hatred of democracy and diversity. In the end, when conservatives complain, they almost always remind me of Rodney Dangerfield playing that self-centered, unloved jerk who moans, “I don’t get no respect!” and blaming the other guys for his troubles.
Richard Mellon Scaife only seemed capable of getting some “respect” because he could afford to pay for it. Andrew Mellon made the money and used it to help build some of the institutions of which America can be proud. Scaife used it to diminish America, supporting anger and ignorance under the guise of “patriotism.”
Maybe Scaife’s money was behind the ugly bumper sticker I saw outside the taco place this morning: “Don’t blame me. I voted for the American.”