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Ruddy’s non-explanation of his praise of Clinton
I said to Chris Ruddy in an e-mail last weekend that given his long record as a relentless Clinton critic it was wrong of him to tell the New York Times that Clinton had been “good president in a lot of ways,” without providing any further explanation of what appeared to be a stunning turnabout in his views. Ruddy told me that a more detailed explanation of his position on Clinton would be forthcoming, and it was published at NewsMax yesterday, February 27. As it happens, the piece, “Back to the Future, Clinton-Style,” is a dull and listless recounting of the obvious: that Clinton was good on the economy and government spending and finance (mainly because of Republicans’ influence); bad on scandals; and bad on national security. Astonishingly, Ruddy does not mention the New York Times article that quoted Ruddy, does not mention Ruddy’s comment that he and his funder Richard Scaife have had a “re-thinking” on Clinton, does not explain their re-thinking, and does not mention the misimpression that Ruddy, in his letter to the New York Post, complained the Times created by quoting the approving part of his remarks about Clinton but not the disapproving part. Further, Ruddy doesn’t explain why he chose to speak to the Times at all, given the obvious fact (which Ruddy himself had to have realized) that the Times would use any compliment he gave Clinton to make it appear that the Clintons’ old foes no longer oppose the Clintons for their massive corruption and misuses of power, and therefore never had any principled position against them to begin with. Moreover, as David Horowitz wrote Monday at FrontPage Magazine in a passionate defense of Ruddy and Scaife against John Podhoretz’s attack on them, there’s nothing new about saying that Clinton was good on the economy, a point widely acknowledged by Republicans during the 1990s. What, then, is the “re-thinking” that Ruddy alluded to in the Times, explaining his new view that Clinton was a good president? Ruddy’s column thus does nothing to fix the damage caused by his Times interview, and I have to repeat what I’ve said previously: for Chris Ruddy to spend a decade portraying Clinton as a criminal treasonous president, and then casually tell America’s leading liberal paper that he and his funder Richard Scaife have changed their views of Clinton and now see him as a “good president in a lot of ways,” is a betrayal of the principled stand that conservatives took against the Clinton administration for its systematic debauching of America’s standards of public and private morality. It is a betrayal of the people who thought that Clinton by his actions, and the American people by refusing to hold Clinton account for them, did massive and lasting harm to America, and that this legacy of Clintonism had to be resisted—then and now—if the country were to win back its soul. Ruddy strengthens the impression that he has backed off from any serious condemnation of Clinton with his brief characterization of Clinton’s eight-years-long misuse of the presidential office. “Scandal after scandal plagued the president,” he writes. This is the kind of language that the liberal media commonly use when they portray a person’s bad behavior as something that is being done to him rather than by him, in order to avoid judging him. Ruddy said in his letter to the New York Post that he still stands behind what he wrote about Clinton in the ‘90s. But the Ruddy of the ‘90s would never have used such relativistic, non-judgmental language about Clinton. Since Ruddy himself provides no reason for his change of direction, we’re forced to speculate about it ourselves. The sheer lack of energy and effort that went into his piece may provide a key, suggesting that Ruddy is simply not invested in these issues. Which may further suggest is that he was not deeply invested in his criticisms of the Clinton administration even back in the ‘90s. It was just something he was doing at the time, something he cared about at the time, but now the times have moved on, and so has he. There was nothing of lasting importance about it. That’s the attitude he conveyed in his New York Times interview, which in turn enabled the Times to portray the Clinton critics as people who were acting out of anger, dislike, culture prejudices, or base political motives. Another possibility is that Ruddy’s funder Scaife, who in the ‘90s launched investigation after investigation trying to find criminal activity by Clinton, no longer wants be known as an anti-Clintonite, and Ruddy is simply reflecting that shift of position.
Where then does this leave Ruddy on the two most important issues, the moral issue and the national issue? On the moral issue, Ruddy, a devout Catholic and one of the best-known of the anti-Clinton journalists of the ‘90, now praises Clinton as a “good president in a lot of ways” and refers to Clinton’s scandals in non-judgmental terms. On the national issue, Ruddy calls for a tripling of the influx of immigrants to three million immigrants a year. Email entry |