What happens to people who aren’t founded in principle

Now there’s spiritual warfare
Flesh and blood breakin’ down
—Bob Dylan

Do you remember when David Brock, the former point man in the American Spectator’s campaign of exposes of President Clinton, did a 180 and denounced his former writings? Do you remember when Christopher Ruddy, another major Clinton opponent for a decade, praised Clinton to the New York Times last February? Now yet another leading Clinton foe—the man, who, in fact, funded the American Spectator and David Brock’s articles as well as Christopher Ruddy’s work—has also recanted his anti-Clintonism:

PITTSBURGH (AP)—Billionaire newspaper publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, who spent millions investigating President Clinton, said the two had a long lunch over the summer and that he found the ex-president to be charismatic.

Scaife also said philandering “is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.”

Scaife made the remarks in an interview with Vanity Fair, his first interview in eight years, according to the magazine. The comments appear in the February issue in a story about Scaife’s troublesome divorce from Margaret Ritchie Battle Scaife.

In the story, Scaife described the lunch at Clinton’s New York office as “very pleasant.”

“I never met such a charismatic man in my whole life,” Scaife said.

Scaife, a billionaire heir to the Mellon banking and oil fortune, said he tried to show Clinton that he isn’t “a total Republican libertarian” by talking about their mutual friend, U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.

Scaife also told the magazine: “I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage.”

Clinton gave Scaife an autographed copy of his book and Scaife said he later sent $100,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Forbes magazine has estimated Scaife’s wealth at $1.3 billion.

Several foundations controlled by Scaife gave millions of dollars to organizations run by critics of Clinton, including $1.7 million for a project at the conservative American Spectator magazine to dig up information about his role in the Whitewater real estate scandal.

Scaife is surprised that Bill Clinton is charismatic? Like, uh, he didn’t know this about the man? So therefore, on meeting Big Bill, he’s swept off his feet?

The reversals by Brock, Ruddy, and Scaife show that their earlier work, while factually true, was not based in moral truth. It was just what they were into at the time, it served their interests or desires at the time. Ultimately, none of it mattered to them. And they’re not the only ones. Over the past eight years, many conservatives have turned around and attacked the conservative anti-Clintonism of the ’90s, treating it as the moral equivalent of the insane leftist Bush hatred of the present decade. And that’s not counting the Bush family’s embrace of Clinton, resulting in his complete rehabilitation. As a result of this abandonment of principle, the Clintons have been “cleansed” and now are in a position to re-enter the White House.

By giving up their previous correct condemnation of Clinton, the conservatives have in effect said that the condemnation was never anything but raw partisanship. Having given up principle, what do they have left?

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The commenters at Lucianne.com are having none of it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 03, 2008 05:23 PM | Send