The Tribune-Review And David Brock

It always amazes me how little research The Tribune-Review's editorial board thinks its readers should do.

Today is a purr-fect example - in which they actually get a fact wrong (gasp!) in a smear.

Take a look:

You can almost imagine Dawn Le foaming at the mouth and shouting at the top of her lungs as she wrote her latest press release for American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal advocacy group. In a Tuesday email, she writes that the Koch brothers “sow chaos in states to protect their puppet senators.” One of them, supposedly, is Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., who's being challenged by uber-left Democrat Katie McGinty. Of course, there's no mention in Ms. Le's rant that American Bridge was the brainchild of liberal pecan David Brock and who's first large donor was “progressive” moneyman George Soros. Cue the laugh track.

You can see Dawn Le's piece here.  Notice first, how little of it involves Pat Toomey.  It's almost as if he's added as an after thought.

Anyway, I want to focus on what the braintrust had to say about David Brock - that his "first large donor" was George Soros.

Wrong.

Take a look at this piece from David Brock himself:

ther than shaking his hand at various conservative galas around Washington, I sat down for an audience with Richard Mellon-Scaife, a big financial supporter of my anti-Clinton work at The American Spectator, where I was the lead investigative reporter, just once. One morning in 1994, I was summoned to the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown to meet my benefactor for lunch.

For the record, 1994 is twenty-two years ago. I'd say this is some pretty good evidence that David Brock's first "first large donor" was none other than the former owner of the Tribune-Review, the late Richard Mellon Scaife.

No mention of that in the braintrust's foaming rant about David Brock and Dawn Le, of course.

But take a look at what they're accusing Soros of and now read what Brock had to say about Scaife:

Despite his legendary low profile, quiet demeanor and apparent hands-off style, Scaife, who died last week at the age of 82, certainly had vast sway in shaping the modern conservative movement. Long before the era of SuperPACs enabled big money to shape our political system, he did this, first, by using his banking fortune to move politics far to the right by heavily funding activist think tanks like the Heritage Foundation (where I also once worked) and, later, to upend the presidency in the Clinton era, by bankrolling several scandal-mongering publications, including the Spectator, the Western Journalism Center, NewsMax and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. They were part of a then-nascent right-wing media echo chamber—the forerunners to the Drudge Report and the Fox News Channel.

Whatever else one can say about him, Scaife was generous with his largesse. I have vivid recollections of the “Dear Mr. Scaife” letters that Spectator staffers would send off to Pittsburgh requesting six-figure sums for anti-Clinton research. The checks typically arrived promptly, no questions asked.

Scaife was doing that two decades ago.  Can we cue the laugh track now?