On the eve of today’s Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, conservative patron and publisher Richard Mellon Scaife did an historic turnabout on New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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On Sunday, Scaife’s newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, endorsed Clinton, saying that Clinton had demonstrated political courage, while Obama had not. If that wasn’t strange enough, Clinton’s campaign put out a release touting the endorsement.
For those who may have forgotten, this is the same Scaife who used the Tribune-Review in the 1990s to try to prove that Clinton killed White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr., who committed suicide in 1993.
Scaife has repeatedly called Foster’s death “the Rosetta stone to the Clinton administration” (a reference to the stone found in Egypt that allowed scholars to decipher ancient hieroglyphics), the Washington Post wrote in 1999.
Scaife also gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to unearth dirt on former President Bill Clinton and supported other conservative groups that pilloried his administration. After hiring private investigators, the magazine reported that Clinton had asked state troopers to help procure women for him and that he had sexually harassed a state worker named Paula Jones. Jones’s legal case against Clinton helped launch an independent counsel investigation that eventually exposed his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
At the time, First Lady Clinton railed against “a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president,” and identified Scaife as its benefactor.
Beyond that, Slate’s Tim Noah describes Scaife as “a raging misogynist. “In 1981, Noah recounts, Scaife called a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review a “fucking Communist cunt”; more recently, he had his wife arrested and jailed for trespassing when she sought to confront him over his extramarital affair with a woman twice arrested for prostitution.
All of which is to say that the Tribune-Review’s endorsement appears a bit suspect - notwithstanding that Scaife telegraphed a change of heart last month after Clinton sat down with him and the paper’s editorial board.
Afterward, in an editorial headlined, Hillary, Reassessed, Scaife declared that her courage in attending the meeting “changed my mind about her.”
Perhaps. But perhaps the patron of conservative causes is simply pushing Clinton because he believes that she would be easier to defeat in the fall than Barack Obama.
The Tribune-Review is the largest newspaper in Pennsylvania to have endorsed Clinton. The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Scranton Times Tribune and the Morning Call of Allentown all endorsed Obama.
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2 Comments
#1. jacksmith 04.22.2008
MY FELLOW “BITTER”, STUPID, WORKING CLASS PEOPLE :-)
If you think like Barack Obama, that WORKING CLASS PEOPLE are just a bunch of “BITTER”!, STUPID, PEASANTS, Cash COWS!, and CANNON FODDER. :-(
You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you think Barack Obama with little or no experience would be better than Hillary Clinton with 35 years experience.
You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you think that Obama with no experience can fix an economy on the verge of collapse better than Hillary Clinton. Whose ;-) husband (Bill Clinton) led the greatest economic expansion, and prosperity in American history.
You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you think that Obama with no experience fighting for universal health care can get it for you better than Hillary Clinton. Who anticipated this current health care crisis back in 1993, and fought a pitched battle against overwhelming odds to get universal health care for all the American people.
You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you think that Obama with no experience can manage, and get us out of two wars better than Hillary Clinton. Whose ;-) husband (Bill Clinton) went to war only when he was convinced that he absolutely had to. Then completed the mission in record time against a nuclear power. AND DID NOT LOSE THE LIFE OF A SINGLE AMERICAN SOLDIER. NOT ONE!
You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you think that Obama with no experience saving the environment is better than Hillary Clinton. Whose ;-) husband (Bill Clinton) left office with the greatest amount of environmental cleanup, and protections in American history.
You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you think that Obama with little or no education experience is better than Hillary Clinton. Whose ;-) husband (Bill Clinton) made higher education affordable for every American. And created higher job demand and starting salary’s than they had ever been before or since.
You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you think that Obama with no experience will be better than Hillary Clinton who spent 8 years at the right hand of President Bill Clinton. Who is already on record as one of the greatest Presidents in American history.
You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you think that you can change the way Washington works with pretty speeches from Obama, rather than with the experience, and political expertise of two master politicians ON YOUR SIDE like Hillary and Bill Clinton..
You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you think all those Republicans voting for Obama in the Democratic primaries, and caucuses are doing so because they think he is a stronger Democratic candidate than Hillary Clinton. :-)
Best regards
jacksmith… Working Class :-)
p.s. You Might Be An Idiot! :-)
If you don’t know that the huge amounts of money funding the Obama campaign to try and defeat Hillary Clinton is coming in from the insurance, and medical industry, that has been ripping you off, and killing you and your children. And denying you, and your loved ones the life saving medical care you needed. All just so they can make more huge immoral profits for them-selves off of your suffering…
You see, back in 1993 Hillary Clinton had the audacity, and nerve to try and get quality, affordable universal health care for everyone to prevent the suffering and needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of you each year. :-)
Approx. 100,000 of you die each year from medical accidents from a rush to profit by the insurance, and medical industry. Another 120,000 of you die each year from treatable illness that people in other developed countries don’t die from. And I could go on, and on…
#2. hal 04.22.2008
jacksmith, you are so smart! You write just like one of them Operation Chaos folks what ol’ Rush Limbaugh has all votin’ for Hillary all over the country, trying to sink America so you can have us American citizens all shipped over to the Dominican Republic so you and Mr. Limbaugh can have your way with us while you gobble Mexican Viagra. Shame on you!
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