Newsmax is hosting a presidential debate and WorldNetDaily isn’t, and Joseph Farah has a big ol’ case of sour grapes over it.
In that vein, Farah devotes his Dec. 6 column to challenging Newsmax co-owner Richard Mellon Scaife’s “bona fides as ‘Republican’ and as a ‘conservative.'” In a rare bit of disclosure, Farah admits that Scaife “provided some funds for a nonprofit investigative reporting center I founded called the Western Journalism Center,” as well as served as “a member of the board and held a minority ownership interest” when he was editor of the twice-deceased Sacramento Union.
Farah complains that Scaife “actively and publicly defends continued federal subsidies for the largest abortion machine in America – Planned Parenthood”:
Last April, Planned Parenthood took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal featuring an op-ed Scaife wrote titled forthrightly, “Why Conservatives Should Oppose Efforts to Defund Planned Parenthood.”
Not only is Scaife’s idea anathema to religious conservatives, it is opposed by most of the prominent economic conservatives and most libertarians who recognize that a $1 billion extremist organization whose primary mission is killings babies doesn’t deserve hundreds of millions in federal subsidies.
You’ve got to read the entire diatribe for yourself in which Scaife lauds Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger – a prominent eugenicist who sought to eradicate the black race! In a 1939 letter, she wrote: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
Farah is taking that Sanger quote out of context. According to FactCheck.org:
Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose, that the clinics aimed to “exterminate the Negro population.” She didn’t say that she wanted to “exterminate” the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says that this quote has “gone viral on the Internet,” normally out of context, and it “doesn’t reflect the fact that Sanger recognized elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south, unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the Project had a humanitarian aim.”
Farah finishes throwing Scaife under his bus:
One of Scaife’s own deep, dark secrets is that, although he has spread millions around in conservative establishment causes and organizations, including some of Newt Gingrich’s pet projects, his real heart and passion has always been supporting the wholesale slaughter of unborn Americans, who are entitled to constitutional protections promised, by the founders, to “ourselves and our Posterity.” A literal definition of “posterity” is “unborn succeeding generations.”
[…]
It is partly Scaife’s anti-life compulsion that has, over the years, driven him to team up with, variously, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, former Rep. Jack Murtha and John Kerry.Conservatives and Republicans are less inclined to speak ill of Scaife, because so many have been bankrolled by him.
Personally, I think of Scaife as the bank that keeps the conservative movement from being effective and doing what is really necessary to take back the country.
That’s a far cry from 1998, when he declared, “I’d be happy to accept Scaife’s money. There’s nothing tainted about it.” Now that Scaife is funding a more successful rival and there is no chance he will send any cash WND’s way, Farah is suddenly feeling free to dis him.
Meanwhile, Farah has a few sour persimmons left over to toss Donald Trump’s way for his participation in the debate:
Then there’s the matter of Trump. Ron Paul may have said it best in his public statement declining the invitation to participate in the debate: “The selection of a reality television personality to host a presidential debate that voters nationwide will be watching is beneath the office of the presidency and flies in the face of that office’s history and dignity.”
Paul might have added the unseemliness of a GOP presidential debate being hosted by a guy who himself continues to flirt publicly with the idea of a third-party run for the presidency.
Farah, however, is not so soured on Trump that he won’t pretend that he’s a person who should be taken seriously by splashing Trump’s latest birther rantings across WND’s front page. Of course, Trump is about as likely to send cash Farah’s way as Scaife is.