An article in the current issue of Vanity Fair looks at the messy, incredibly expensive divorce of rightwing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, whose current wife (and former mistress) discovered he was having an ongoing affair with a much-younger woman (he’s 75, she’s in her 40s) who was once caught up in a prostitution sting.

“I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage.”
- Scaife

Scaife’s best known political activity was spending over $2 million to fund the “Arkansas Project,” the investigation into the Clintons’ personal life that Hillary Clinton called a “vast rightwing conspiracy.” (She was wrong of course, the rightwing conspiracy was not “vast.” It was just a handful of clueless Yankees who used Scaife’s millions to pay Arkansas liars to tell lies they would have gladly told for free.)

But it turns out Scaife’s conservatism is purely economic, and even though he funds the rightwing lunatic fringe, he actually holds many views that moralists abhor — in particular on gay marriage:

Does he think his best gay friends should be able to get married? Scaife throws his hand in the air and exclaims, “Yes, I do!” A moment later he adds, “I haven’t really thought about it. But if they want to get married, that’s their business. I couldn’t care less.”

Ironically, “couldn’t care less” about personal matters was the rightwing’s default position until Scaife and others helped give rise to the moralists who have dominated American politics since the Reagan era.

Here’s Scaife’s position on infidelity:

Asked whether his infidelity is hypocritical, in light of his political commitments, he refers not to a moral principle but to his own personal history. “My first marriage ended with an affair,” he says, amused. And monogamy is not, he continues, an essential part of a good marriage. “I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage.” Philandering, Scaife says with a laugh, “is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.”

Scaife is worth billions, all of which he inherited. Because there was no prenup, his soon-to-be ex-wife is already set for life:

[Last] August, owing to an apparent clerical error, the filings were posted on a court Web page. Poring over them, Dennis Roddy, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — the city’s oldest newspaper, and the liberal rival to Scaife’s conservative Tribune-Review — disclosed previously unknown financial details about Richard Scaife’s $1.4 billion fortune and about Ritchie’s jaw-dropping, court-ordered interim support payments of $725,000 a month. (This stream of income, Scaife’s lawyers noted, “produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year than the salary of the president of the United States.” Unconfirmed reports suggest that Ritchie’s interim monthly payments have since increased, to more than $1 million.)

In light of this, a case could be made that the U.S. Treasury should bill him for the cost of the Ken Starr investigation — about $60 million, if memory serves — and the cost of the impeachment, which was probably another $10 million, at least. It’s chickenfeed for him, and, considering the fact that none of it would have happened without his funding, it is the least he could do for his country.

Scaife, by the way, was a nominee to Pensito Review’s GOP Adulterers Hall of Fame last year.