NOW THEY TELL US CLINTON-BASHERS' WEIRDEST TWIST John Podhoretz
THE four "Ghostbusters" in the classic 1984 movie warn New York's mayor of some "real wrath-of-God-type stuff" - that we're all "headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling, the dead rising from the grave! Dogs and cats living together!" They're later proved right, as a 100-foot-tall marshmallow man arrives to threaten the tony co-op buildings along Central Park West.
Yesterday brought an indication that a giant marshmallow man might show up in this city sometime very soon.
In a New York Times story, a conservative journalist named Chris Ruddy (who once long ago worked for this newspaper) declared that he and his boss, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, had changed their minds about someone who had preoccupied them in the 1990s: Bill Clinton.
"Clinton," said Ruddy, "wasn't such a bad president. In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick [Scaife] feels that way today."
Excuse me? A pretty good president? Chris Ruddy and Dick Scaife think Bill Clinton was a pretty good president?
Dogs and cats living together!
Scaife was the key funder of, and Ruddy a dominating figure in, the '90s effort to cast Bill and Hillary Clinton in the worst possible light in every conceivable way. Their efforts went far beyond criticism of Bill's policies and Hillary's questionable business practices to irresponsible and frankly disgusting hints that either or both of them committed unspeakable crimes - including murder.
Ruddy, for example, promoted the notion that the 1993 death of White House Counsel Vincent Foster was no suicide - charging that Foster had met with "foul play" in the White House itself, with his body then transported to a Virginia park. The clear implication was that someone very high up indeed had ordered the hit. Ruddy never specifically said that was Hillary or Bill - he didn't have to: His readers connected the dots just fine.
Ruddy also helped push the claim that Bill Clinton played some unspecified role in the murder of two teens near Arkansas' Mena airstrip that had been used for drug smuggling.
These wild, florid and deeply irresponsible allegations weren't just outrageous in themselves. Ruddy and Scaife (who paid for the "investigative research") also undermined those on the Right who were attempting principled critiques.
The scandal-mongering may have stoked vast hatred of the Clintons, but it also gave Bill and Hillary the means to construct a plausible case for their supporters and the media that they were the subjects of crazed and unjust persecution.
It was all of a piece, the Clintons said: The false charges about Mena and Vince Foster were no different from the accusations of suborning perjury in the Monica Lewinsky case. It was all, as Hillary famously said, "a vast right-wing conspiracy."
Except that it wasn't. Consider the fact that Ruddy himself spent years trashing Clinton special prosecutor Kenneth Starr for failing to go after Clinton aggressively enough due to Starr's hunger for a Supreme Court appointment. In fact, Starr's conduct of the case was deemed far too aggressive, thereby dooming his high-court hopes.
So according to Chris Ruddy, circa 2007, the man he considered a murderous rapist, Bill Clinton, was a "pretty good president." Funny, but all the things that might have led one to that conclusion - pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement, signing welfare reform into law, ending the genocide in Kosovo - were entirely in evidence during Clinton's presidency. The things that might lead one to think Clinton was a bad president - the failure to get Osama bin Laden or to respond more forcefully to the growing terrorist threat - are actually more apparent in retrospect.
And as for Mrs. Clinton, the woman Ruddy once considered a felonious, embezzling virago? "She has moderated and developed a separate image," Ruddy says.
In "Can She Be Stopped?" (my book last year on Hillary's presidential ambitions), I offered the suggestion that "America is tired of Clinton fatigue" - that Hillary is electable in 2008 because the national disdain for her husband's personal conduct in office will largely have faded away by then. Never in a million years could I have imagined that Chris Ruddy and Richard Mellon Scaife would be among the earliest voices to offer support for my theory.
Like Bill Murray says in "Ghostbusters" as the Marshmallow Man marches toward him to seal his fate, "There's something you don't see every day."