It's not exactly vituperative toxicity, but it's something.
We've urged for months to bring our troops home. Now is the time.
This wasn't written by Richard Mellon Scaife -- but it was published in the paper he used for the purpose of undermining the Democratic Party in general and the Clinton White House in specific: the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
This is not particularly notable. I frankly find it hard to believe that any person with a modicum of intelligence, even War Cheerleaders like Bill Kristol, could not come to this conclusion, it's so obvious. What I do find notable is this:
We had to question [Bush's] mental stability.
I'm sure everyone here is familiar with Scaife's name, at the least. In short, he more or less founded the entity that Hillary Clinton called the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy: the loose network of Republican activists, right-leaning news outlets, and angry middle-class white men who invented, embellished, and echoed conspiracy after conspiracy about the Clintons in order to undercut Bill Clinton's effectiveness as President. Scaife's Arkansas Project was the vehicle that gave life to the decade and more of laughably ridiculous accusations against the Clintons which kept WJC so distracted that he was unable to accomplish everything he wanted to. (My personal favorite is the accusation that the Clintons somehow conspired to murder White House counsel Vince Foster; until 9/11 and its attendant crackpot cooking, this was tinfoilhattery par excellence and set the model for lunatics with an axe to grind but no facts to support their wild hallucinations.)
Perhaps lesser known is the fact that he bought a small newspaper in the Pittsburgh area, the Greensburg Tribune-Review, with the goal of making into a shining example of conservative journalism. Of course, the way to build credibility and change what was essentially a small-town newsletter into a legitimate news outlet is not to publish baseless stories about Presidential peccadilloes. What Scaife wanted was something to legitimize his viewpoint, so he left the rumor-scraping-upping to his shadow network, and concentrated on building a solid reputation for the Tribune-Review. As a result, the Trib is actually not as bad as you might expect. It's right-leaning, but it does not topple under the weight of repeated bowing and scraping to the fascists running the Republic Party. And it often has better local coverage than the other major daily in town, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In short, it is not simply a cesspool of Democrat-bashing.
So what is it? I would call it a right-wing propaganda mill that has done a good job of masquerading itself as mainstream. This means that it functions as two things: 1. A front for fascists (I hope that's not too extreme, but there is little doubt in my mind that the remaining Bush core would be quite happy with a fascist government) and 2. a mainstream newspaper. Because, let's face it, we don't get to decide what's mainstream; and with circulation numbers of 150,000 daily*, it's tough to argue that it represents only fringe viewpoints.
And that's why I find the above statement so remarkable. A right-wing, but still somehow mainstream newspaper is not only pushing for immediate withdrawal from the Iraq occupation, but is actually questioning Bush's psychological fitness. Read the whole passage:
President Bush warns that U.S. withdrawal would risk "mass killings on a horrific scale." What do we have today, sir?
And quite frankly, during last Thursday's news conference, when George Bush started blathering about "sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don't enable you to be loved," we had to question his mental stability.
I could go on about what this means, but I'm no social scientist. I'm no psychologist. I'm no politico. I'm just an average reader who can see that now, even the wingnuts are beginning to realize what many of us on the left have known for a while: That the Bush Administration is dangerously and perhaps insanely out of control.
I have no doubts that this is a part of the continuing strategy of the right to get back to the political mainstream without giving up the things they hold dear, chiefly making the rich richer and the poor poorer. And I'm under no illusion that, simply because they have come to accept reality, the Trib is some sort of ally of ours; they're not.
But I can't help but be encouraged by the fact that Richard Mellon Scaife is now suggesting Bush is unstable. In some small way, this has to be good for America. * Keep in mind, this circulation number is vastly overstated, as many copies of the paper are given away in an effort to boost readership. I have to call their distribution office periodically to ask them to stop littering my doorstep; this is common enough that the phone number for distribution gets you directly to a voice mail that asks you to leave your name and address if you want delivery of the free paper to stop. Nevertheless, the paper does make its way to 150,000 pairs of hands each day, and even if it's only in most hands long enough to make it to the recycling bucket, that's not insignificant.