Today Hillary Clinton won the endorsement of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a newspaper owned by billionaire right-wing activist Richard Mellon Scaife.
If you don't already know who Richard Mellon Scaife is, I apologize in advance for allowing him into your life. In the 1990s, he funded some of the most virulent anti-Clinton efforts, spreading scurrilous smears about Bill and Hillary Clinton through his various media outlets. Take for example this 2002 article published in the Tribune-Review, which tried to paint Clinton as a Marxist radical:
In 1969, a group of Black Panthers was on trial in New Haven, Conn., charged with the torture killing of one of their comrades. The story goes that Hillary Clinton, then a student at Yale and working with the ultra-radical National Lawyers Guild, supported the Panthers and helped shut down the university with protests. Today, Hillary's friends will say, "It is hard to fault her efforts to monitor the trial." They don't want to comment on the fact that the future first lady joined the law office of hard-core communist Robert Truhaft as an intern and worked with him on defense strategies for the New Haven Nine.
Sound familiar?
The article got worse from there, falsely accusing Hillary Clinton of complicity in the death of Vince Foster, one of her best friends who committed suicide in the first year of the Clinton Administration.
On July 20, 1993, Vince Foster was found dead. His death officially was termed a suicide but is suspected by many to be a murder — if not a superbly planned assassination. The cover-up that followed Foster's death is one of many compelling reasons Hillary Clinton must be defeated if she ever again runs for public office.
Throughout the 1990s, Scaife was the leading funder of "The Arkansas Project," a surreptitious group devoted to destroying Bill Clinton -- ultimately helping lead to his impeachment. Watch these clip from "The Hunting of the President" about the right-wing assault on Bill Clinton:
"The Hunting of the President" is not some obscure flick -- Bill Clinton supported it, and spoke passionately at its premiere on June 16, 2004, focusing on the evils of the right-wing attack on his presidency.
So how must he have felt today when Hillary Clinton won the endorsement of Scaife's propaganda organ?
And this was no spontaneous endorsement, coming from nowhere. It was an endorsement that Hillary Clinton actively sought. If you'll recall, during the editorial board meeting, she opened up her first line of attack on Barack Obama over Jeremiah Wright -- inside Scaife's office. (She says she was just answering a direct line of questioning, but one day earlier she had refused to answer a similar question during the Philadelphia Daily News endorsement intereview.)
They truly have become as bad their own worst enemy.
And now they are attacking us.
Update: To fully appreciate the cynicism of the Clintons, read this article by Joe Conason, who co-wrote the book that the movie was based on.
© Jed Lewison