If you hadn’t heard, Richard Mellon Scaife is dead. Scaife bankrolled The Arkansas Project.
Democrats lost the Congress in 1994 not so much because of gun control legislation pushed by the Clinton White House, nor because of union disaffection with NAFTA, nor because of Hillary Clinton’s incompetence in putting together healthcare reform, although all of these contributed, but because of right-wing money used to corrupt elections and the media. The most effective of those efforts was right-wing talk radio, demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, who could never have remained on the airwaves had the FCC continued to enforce the laws that required that the airwaves must be of benefit to the community. Indeed, Limbaugh was in part a creation of Republican operative and Fox Noise chief Roger Ailes:
…Ailes’ most important contribution to the covert campaign involved his new specialty: right-wing media. The tobacco giants hired Ailes, in part, because he had just brought Rush Limbaugh to the small screen, serving as executive producer of Rush’s syndicated, late-night TV show. Now they wanted Ailes to get Limbaugh onboard to crush health care reform. “RJR has trained 200 people to call in to shows,” a March 1993 memo revealed. “A packet has gone to Limbaugh. We need to brief Ailes.”
But demagogues are of little use unless they are fed talking points. Joe Coors bankrolled the Heritage Foundation to produce laughably false talking points precisely so that these lies could be spread through conservative propaganda outlets like the Limbaugh show. Heritage became a Scaife property, along with countless other institutions devoted to undermining the ability of the American people to govern themselves.
The American Spectator was funded by Richard Mellon Scaife. The American Spectator used pseudo-investigative reporting to unearth gossip and rumors about Bill Clinton. His alumni and/or funding is behind such credits to the journalistic profession as WorldNet Daily and Newsmax.
Scaife left a small fraction of his fortune to the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art. His inherited assets go to the conservative Sarah Mellon Scaife and Allegheny Foundations to carry on his work of scarring America. And the rest to the Scaife Revocable Trust.
Scaife donated $100K to The Clinton Foundation. And Bill Clinton, ever desperate for approval, not only forgave his old enemy, but gave a eulogy at his funeral.
As someone who spent countless hours defending Bill Clinton, I am sorry I wasted the time. Richard Mellon Scaife tried to destroy democracy in this country. He largely succeeded. It is not enough to fight fiercely for what you believe, as Clinton eulogized. Every vulture, every jackal, every shark does the same. What matters is a commitment to truth and to justice. Bill Clinton has eulogized savagery, and spit on truth and justice. I cannot but wonder whether Clinto would have reconciled with Scaife if Scaife had not donated to the Clinton Foundation.
One need not hate Richard Mellon Scaife–I do not–to recognize that he was the enemy to everything good and decent about America. One need not hate Bill Clinton–I do not–to recognize that he is indeed amoral, though not in the ways his enemies said.
“The evil that men do lives after them, while the good is oft interred with their bones.” —Marc Antony in Julius Caesar
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Update. Christopher Reed, The Guardian:
Then came his [Scaife’s] curious London adventure. His father had become an officer in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, in second world war London, and Scaife maintained an interest in clandestine activities. In 1973 he bought Kern House Enterprises, a US firm that ran Forum World Features, a London-based supplier of articles to dozens of newspapers around the world.
However, in 1975 a CIA memo from seven years earlier came to light. It described Forum as a propaganda unit sponsored by the CIA to combat communism and to further conservative politics. Scaife quickly withdrew his money amid widespread unfavourable publicity about the syndicate.