Mr. Scaife, reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, spent more than $2 million investigating and publicizing accusations about the supposed involvement of Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton in corrupt land deals, sexual affairs, drug running and murder.
But now, as Mrs. Clinton is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Scaife’s checkbook is staying in his pocket.
Christopher Ruddy, who once worked full-time for Mr. Scaife investigating the Clintons and now runs a conservative online publication he co-owns with Mr. Scaife, said, “Both of us have had a rethinking.”
“Clinton wasn’t such a bad president,” Mr. Ruddy said. “In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today.”
Could it be that two Bush terms have made even the stoutest Clinton haters miss him? This is like opening up the New York Times in 2014 to find Markos Moulitsas waxing nostalgic for Dubya.
The only major Democratic candidate I think at this point would be a terrible president is Mrs. Clinton. That said, the idea of cranking up the old anti-Clinton machine is depressing to contemplate. Notice how the whole right-wing book genre that's been so hot for about a decade has hit the skids lately? For better or for worse, the hate-Hillary moment has passed, I think. Again, I still think she'd be a terrible president, but the thrill of hating Hillary has gone. When the usual conservative suspects start marching the same old tropes out, it will have all the electricity and urgency of a Traveling Wilburys concert.
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Why is any kind of hatred is acceptable to the purported Christians who lurk here? People projected all sorts of things on to Mrs. Clinton, when it appeared to me that her "crime" was being a smart, successful professional woman.
While it's interesting to wonder if the presidency of GWB has mustered a healthy dose of Clinton nostalgia on the right, I think a more plausible explanation for the paucity of Hillary hatred is that the impeachment and the circus that led up top it left more of a black eye on the right than on Bill Clinton. The man left office with a 60 percent approval rating, and the right was seen as a bunch of knee-jerk reactionaries who wasting hundreds of millions of tax dollars on a bunch of nonsense.
As someone whose favorite President of my lifetime (I'm 52) is Bill Clinton (before there is a collective groan, regarding his sexual behavior, I do believe he brought his problems on himself, even though those problems were exploited by "the vast Right-Wing conspiracy.") However, I've never been a big Hillary fan. But, I don't think she would necessarily be a bad President, and I am considering supporting her. You don't have to like someone to vote for them, and we might be better off sometimes if we held our noses and voted for the person we felt would do the best job, rather than the person we would most enjoy having a beer with.
I'm not sure Scaife should be taken at his word. This strikes me as Lucy Van Pelt holding the football out to Charlie Brown, promising not to pull it away this. "Go ahead, Dems! Nominate Hillary! We'll hold our fire!"
pull it away this. = pull it away this time.
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