Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows

I'm adding Richard Mellon Scaife to my list of wealthy men responsible for the stupifying of America with prolefeed and pseudo-scandal.

Scaife is heir to the Mellon family's banking, oil, and aluminum fortunes. In 1970 he bought the The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He also owns 7.2% of NewsMax Media, a news-based website with conservative political content.

During President Clinton's tenure in the White House, Scaife funded The Arkansas Project, which had as its objective the unearthing of damaging information about President Clinton.

Remember those wacky conspiracy theories about the Clintons --e.g., how the Clintons worked with the CIA to run a drug smuggling operation in Arkansas, and how Clinton had White House aide Vince Foster murdered as part of a cover up regarding a land deal called "Whitewater"? That stuff originated in Sciafe's newspaper.

In 1996 Sciafe endowed a new school of public policy at Pepperdine University. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was named the first dean of this school. Yes, that Ken Starr, the Clinton ankle-biter.

Did Ken's appointment by Sciafe look like a quid pro quo for a job well done? Oh yes it did. The controversy over the appointment prevented Starr from taking the position, and in 1998 he finally declined the job.

But time heals all, as they say. In 2004, Ken Starr was picked to head Pepperdine's law school. Woot!

Pepperdine. Say, isn't that where Ben Stein filmed his fake lecture before an audience of fake students in that dreadful Expelled flick? Hmm.

A couple of weeks ago something very curious happened. Two days before Pennsylvania's presidential primary, where the race between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama seemed too close to call, Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune Review gave its endorsement to Hillary Clinton.

Now you say, whaa?

Following the Money

Howard Ahmanson, like Sun Myung Moon, has a lot of money and he's not afraid to spend it on political favors and media time. I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with this, provided the objective was, at minimum, reality-friendly.

But Ahmanson is living in a theological castle built within his own head, a rather strange place where there's nothing wrong with, say, stoning adulterers and homosexuals.

I think when you become a little too rich, people stop telling you that your breath stinks, or your joke isn't funny, or you're boring the crap out of everyone. And thus you slowly morph from something basically recognizable as human into something more like Tom Cruise.

Following the Money is a report published by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, where apparently not everyone is happy with Ahmanson.

Since the 1970s, charitable foundations established by families with politically conservative views have donated billions of dollars to what the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, has called "an extraordinary effort to reshape politics and public policy priorities at the national, state and local level."

There's too much there to summarize here. But I'll mention one bit which illustrates a familiar deception: guilt by association.

CEPAD ran a network of medical clinics for the poor, as well as a successful literacy campaign, according to Fred Clark, an editor of Prism , the magazine of Evangelicals for Social Action. "That literacy work had won the admiration and support of Nicaragua 's president, Daniel Ortega, and his Sandinista regime. Ortega's praise of CEPAD gave [Diane] Knippers [ed: Ahmanson funded] what she saw as an opening," Clark wrote in a 2003 account.

Although the evangelical churches did not support the Sandinistas, Clark wrote, "Knippers portrayed CEPAD -- and therefore the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society -- as 'guilty' by association. She wrote of CEPAD as a communist front, part of a supposed Soviet beachhead in Nicaragua . No one in this country paid much attention, but the contras did. CEPAD's clinics became targets for their paramilitary terrorists."

Humans are naturally associative thinkers. Rational thought, which is rule-based, impersonal, and self-skeptical, is more difficult. So yes, it is possible to sell nonsense to people simply by associating positive or negative values with the nonsense.

That's what Expelled is all about: associate Hitler, Stalin, smugness, elitism, and black-hearted cruelty with science, and people will feel wary of scientists. Rather convenient if the scientists might challenge something you'd like to say.

The King of America

The King of America is John Gorenfeld's short film about Washington Times publisher Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Moon is one of several uber-rich men effectively inserting propaganda into our news outlets, in order to manipulate the emotions of the general public toward a variety of issues.

Apparently there are plenty of politicians and journalists happy to take this man's money. Look upon the crazy and despair, my fellow Americans.