Right-wing donor Irving Moskowitz

Moskowitz generates his millions from a bingo enterprise in California. The catch is that the gambling license requires that Moskowitz only hand over 1 percent of gross receipts to the city so long as the rest of the profits go to the tax-exempt Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation (net holdings: $52 million). Through this foundation, Moskowitz gives to a bevy of less-than-savory causes — American Crossroads and its dishonest attacks are just the latest. Blumenthal notes that donations involving electoral politics are a relatively new thing for Moskowitz, but he’s got a long history of backing far-right-wing causes. Here are some of his greatest hits:

Islamophobia – Since 2002, the foundation has given $485,000 to the Center for Security Policy, a hawkish Washington think tank run by former Reagan administration official and conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney. As reported in CAP’s “Fear, Inc.,” Gaffney’s group pushes Islamophobia in the U.S., and Gaffney has proclaimed that practicing the Islamic faith is tantamount to “sedition.” Gaffney, who thinks President Obama is Muslim, also leads the advisory group of the Islamophobic group Clarion Fund, which produces documentaries that have been denounced as “inflammatory” and once published approving comments about Norwegian anti-Muslim mass-murderer Anders Breiviks views.

“Birthers” – Since 2006, Moskowitz’s foundation gave $200,000 to the Western Center for Journalism (WCJ), a non-profit founded by Joseph Farah. WCJ describes Farah as “the brains behind WND.com news website.” Formerly known as World Net Daily, WND is a hub for “birtherism,” the conspiracy theory that President Obama’s publicly released birth certificate is a fake, and that Obama therefore is not a U.S. citizen nor eligible to be president. WND even hosts conferences on the issue and WND Books published Jerome Corsi’s “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” tome just after Obama’s long-form certificate was publicly released — though that hasn’t stopped WND’s conspiracy theories. WCJ’s blog, naturally, pushes the same, lame discredited theories.

Israeli settlements – By far, Moskowitz’s most generous philanthropic work — and other non-philanthropic funding — goes toward projects linked to Israel’s settlement enterprise in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, considered “illegitimate” by the U.S. government and international bodies. In addition to gifts of at least $1.985 million to projects in West Bank settlements like Kiryat Arba and Kedumim, Moskowitz’s and his wife’s foundations have donated more than $300,000 to the Hebron Fund, which supports some 800 ideological settlers living in the Palestinian West Bank city. Moskowitz also focuses on East Jerusalem, giving huge sums to developments there, including one million dollars in the late 1980s to purchase a defunct hotel and, as of the late 1990s, more than $2 million to support a religious pro-settlement group in East Jerusalem called Ateret Cohanim.

So far, the millionaire-backed American Crossroads took cash from an oil speculator to run an ad campaign absurdly accusing Obama of driving up gas prices. If the ad campaigns are, as with this case, linked to the donor’s pet causes, American Crossroads could be on its way to putting out some of the most vicious attack ads of the election season.

Yesterday, former top President George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal lamenting that the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden was regarded as an “epic achievement,” and stating that “Obama did what virtually any commander in chief would have done in the same situation.” “Even President Bill Clinton says in the film ‘that’s the call I would have made.’” Only, as ThinkProgress noted yesterday, Bush explicitly did not do what Obama did: take the decision to strike at bin Laden.

As for the selective and misleading Clinton quote, the Wall Street Journal was forced to acknowledge it, updating the online version of the article and appending this note:

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this column included an incomplete quote from Bill Clinton in the last paragraph.

Indeed, Clinton actually said, “I hope that’s the call I would have made.” But Rove’s politically-motivated deceitfulness went even farther than that. Among the various and gracious laudatory statements by former Bush officials about the raid that killed bin Laden were several from Karl Rove himself.

Speaking to Politico for an article published just the day after the raid, Rove said his first reaction was “elation.” The Politico article goes on:

“President Obama did a remarkable job of leadership. It was a very tough decision” to opt for a special operations assault rather than dropping a precision bomb, Rove said.

In his first email exchange with the former president, Rove said Bush wrote: “Great day for justice.”

Furthermore, Media Matters points out that Rove, also the day after the raid, tweeted, “Justice has been done to Osama bin Laden: all Americans are proud of our military, intel & Presidents Bush, Obama. USA! USA!” Here’s the tweet:

To recap: Rove experienced “elation” and thought Obama did a “remarkable job” in making a “tough decision” in ordering the raid to get bin Laden. But now it seems for Rove, politics trumps conviction.

Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

Rove took issue with Hanks’ assertion in the video that Obama’s order to kill Osama bin Laden showed the “ultimate test of leadership”:

As for the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief would have done in the same situation. Even President Bill Clinton says in the film “that’s the call I would have made.” For this to be portrayed as the epic achievement of the first term tells you how bare the White House cupboards are.

As Obama’s former top adviser David Axelrod pointed out on Twitter today, Rove completely mischaracterized Clinton’s quote from the film. The former president actually said of the bin Laden raid: “When I saw what had happened, I thought to myself, I hope that is the call I would have made.”

And former Defense Secretary Robert Gates — himself a Republican who has served numerous presidents in security related roles — doesn’t quite see it the same way as the former president’s chief political operative. “I’ve worked for a lot of these guys,” Gates said on 60 Minutes last year, “and this is one of the most courageous calls — decisions — that I think I’ve ever seen a president make.”

So why this blatant dishonesty from Rove? Given the difficulty with which to assign any political liability to the president for ordering the death of history’s most notorious terrorist, the Republicans’ strategy in this campaign season has been to either downplay Obama’s role in nabbing bin Laden or to pretend that he didn’t have anything to do with it.

But Rove is also probably trying to run interference. Rove said Obama “did what virtually any commander in chief would have done” in ordering the bin Laden raid — virtually any commander-in-chief that is, except his former boss President Bush. Bush famously said of bin Laden in 2002: “I really just don’t spend that much time on him” and in 2006, he reportedly said the al Qaeda leader was “not a top priority use of American resources.” In 2005, Bush shut down the CIA unit that was dedicated to finding bin Laden’s whereabouts and the New York Times reported that Bush and then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld abandoned a plan to capture senior al Qaeda members in early 2005 because they “decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan.”

So it turns out that “virtually” everything in Rove’s op-ed about Obama, Clinton and bin Laden isn’t true.