Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has come out with its anticipated endorsement of Hillary Clinton, a woman its owner once insinuated was guilty of murder. Unsurprisingly, the editorial is lukewarm in its praise for Clinton ("Agree with her or not, you at least know where she stands instead of being forced to wonder. Many of her views on domestic issues are too liberal for us, but on others she seems to have moderated"), but more vigorous when it comes to attacking Barack Obama:
Start with the "God damn America" diatribes of his one-time pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Obama claims he didn't know of these, even though he sat in Wright's church for 20 years.) Add his wife Michelle's remark about being proud of America for the first time in her life only because of her husband's campaign.
Now we hear Obama himself disdaining small-town, Middle-America attitudes and values -- a "clinging" to God, guns and bigotry -- as a legacy of bitterness.
Everyone utters stupidities now and then. Yet taken together and uttered repeatedly, they sound like a pattern of thought in the Obama household. It's a pattern the nation can't afford in the White House.
As noted last week, Pittsburgh's larger, more profitable, not-owned-by-a-right-wing-conspiracy-monger newspaper, the Post-Gazette, has endorsed Obama.
Update: I hadn't even noticed until Steve Benen mentioned it, but the Tribune-Review's endorsement declares Clinton its choice in the "Democrat" primary. Perfect.
--Christopher Orr