Scheer enjoyed his friendships with Clinton White House operatives like James Carville and Sidney Blumenthal as much as he savored the salons of the Hollywood left. Such associations inflate his uncomely sense of superiority over those who figuratively stand on the outside, looking in. In a revealing moment, Scheer once cruelly mocked an unemployed journalist thusly: "Look at you. You support the System, and you're struggling, while I attack it and have a six-figure salary and a yacht, and am surrounded by Hollywood stars." (Reported in David Horowitz's Radical Son.)
Scheer's opportunism is evident in the double standards that governed his reporting on the Clinton Administration. Now Scheer is writing columns which assert that even one Iraqi killed by American arms constitutes a war crime. But in December 1998, when Clinton ordered the firing of 450 missiles into Iraq (more than in the entire Gulf War) and did so on the eve of the impeachment vote in the House, Scheer saw nothing suspicious about the timing. When Clinton ordered the bombing of Kosovo in 1999, Scheer flatly rejected the notion that Clinton may have been using military action as a means of diverting attention away from the stubborn Lewinsky scandal or the recently discovered Chinese espionage at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Scheer was the biggest press defender of Wen Ho Lee). Such accusations were merely the senseless rantings of partisan "jackals" intent on making Clinton feel "the lash of the self-righteous," said Scheer. Only Bush, it seems, can be accused of hidden agendas and ignoble motives.
Consider also Scheer's reaction after Clinton ordered the infamous 1998 missile attacks on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. The attack in the Sudan was in response to terrorist attacks on two American embassies and destroyed the country's only medicine factory which Clinton claimed was a chemical weapons plant. Clinton got no UN approval, did not demand an inspection of the plant, and got no congressional authorization. Scheer, who has viciously attacked Bush for dereliction on these grounds, not only found nothing wrong with Clinton's actions, he defended them. Denouncing those who wondered whether Clinton was "wagging the dog" in an effort to tone down the Lewinsky headlines, Scheer saw nothing objectionable or even suspicious that Clinton launched this strike into a foreign "Third World" country on the very day that Lewinsky was scheduled to testify before a grand jury. Even when the Sudanese site proved to be an aspirin factory that produced half of that war- and famine-ravaged country's legitimate drugs, Scheer called Clinton's missile attack "an appropriate response to the carnage" at the American embassies. "If our modern and very expensive weapons cannot be used against terrorists," he wrote, "what good are they in this post-Cold War world?" In essence, Scheer was endorsing the very policy for which he now condemns President Bush.
Scheer is one of the smelliest piles of offal ever to offend America's nostrils -- so naturally, the Los Angeles Times embraces him as one of their own.