by Taylor Marsh
Do you remember this guy?
How could anyone forget him? He's known as the "Funding Father of the Right." Richard Mellon Scaife was behind the failed hit job on President Bill Clinton, though he did get an impeachment vote for his money and for history.
Well now Joe Lieberman is taking money from the VRWC kingpin. I kid you not. Is he that desperate, or that duplicitous, or both?
This is the type of person who is funding Lieberman's campaign:
Scaife did get involved in numerous anti-Clinton activities. He gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to dig up dirt on Clinton and supported other conservative groups that harassed the president and his administration. The White House and its allies responded by fingering Scaife as the central figure in "a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," as Hillary Rodham Clinton described it. James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide and rabid defender, called Scaife "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against the president."
(snip)
The Heritage Foundation became an important part of the right's community-building efforts. Scaife first contributed to Heritage in 1974. Soon afterward, using money from Scaife, Heritage established its resource bank, a compilation of conservative organizations, which from 1982 was published in the Directory of Public Policy Organizations, a guide to the new right-wing establishment. The current edition lists 300 groups; 111 have received grants from Scaife, 76 of them in 1998.
How any Democrat could take money from Scaife is beyond me. This one smells, even for Lieberman. It's an insult to every Democrat, certainly those primary voters in Connecticut who voted for Ned Lamont.
It was David Brock who revealed Scaife's involvement in the anti-Clinton plot, which finally shed light on the tentacles this man has got throughout the right-wing that has now reached inside the Connecticut race and right into Joe Lieberman's political back pocket. Brock knows all about Mr. Scaife.
Conservative writer David Brock received nearly $40,000 from the American Spectator's Arkansas Project, project records show, despite claims by Spectator editors that Brock had nothing to do with the controversial Clinton-bashing project.
Brock moved to the center of the drama over President Bush's solicitor general nominee, Ted Olson, when he told a Judiciary Committee staffer and the Washington Post that Olson was integral to the Arkansas Project -- the American Spectator's aggressive investigations into the private life of President Clinton, funded with roughly $2 million from conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife -- despite Olson's claims to the contrary. Olson's supporters struck back, insisting Brock had nothing to do with the project.
It was bad enough when Joe Lieberman stood up on the Senate floor and smeared Bill Clinton during his impeachment, when it should have been all Democratic hands on deck. But it's beyond the pale that Lieberman would accept money from the man who helped fund the all out assault on the first two-term Democratic president since F.D.R.
No wonder The New York Times just endorsed Ned Lamont.
Joe Lieberman has no shame. He'll do anything, take anyone's money in order to win. But money from Richard Mellon Scaife? No Democrat would do that, because Scaife simply doesn't give money to Democrats. What does that say about Joe?