If I recall correctly, despite the incessant vilification of ACORN from the right, all investigations and court documents show that ACORN was not guilty of the many accusations hurled at that organization…
With ACORN now officially out of business, conservative ire has found a new focal point: billionaire George Soros.
As the one-man bank behind a plethora of liberal causes, seemingly lefty nonprofits, reviled media outlets like NPR, Democratic candidates and agitating websites like Media Matters, Soros has received an awful lot of attention in the past year, much of it from the commentators at Fox News. In fact, at Fox, Soros’ name has replaced ACORN as the new synonym for all that is wrong with the world.
The past week alone two rather significant Soros stories have made news:
Soros helped the Nazis hunt Jews?
Glenn Beck, who often speaks of Soros as a liberal “puppet master,” unleashed a three-day prolonged attack on the man last week, alleging, among other things, that Soros, who is Jewish, helped the Nazis hunt down fellow Jews during the occupation of Hungary. Those claims did not go down so well with Jewish groups. 
“Glenn Beck’s description of George Soros’ actions during the Holocaust is completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top. For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say — inaccurately — that there’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that’s horrific,” The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles said in a statement.
Sarah Palin staffer on Soros’ payroll?
Salon.com gleefully pointed out today that one of Sarah Palin’s staffers is, in fact, on Soros’ payroll. Randy Scheunemann, one of Palin’s foreign policy advisers, runs a D.C. consulting firm Called Orion Strategies, Salon reported, that since 2003 has been paid more than $150,000 for lobbying work by the Open Society Policy Center, one of Soros’ outfits.
As Politico’s Ben Smith points out, the Scheunemann-Soros connection really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
There’s no gotcha, and no contradiction, here. Despite Soros’s left-leaning domestic politics and his sympathies for the Palestinians — the issues that make headlines here — his biggest investment, and his historic impact, was in dismantling real Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. He backed dissidents before the Soviet Union collapsed, and anybody who spent time out there in the ’90s saw a new liberal civil society of which he was the earliest and most important underwriter. His work to undermine Burma’s brutal dictatorship is an extension of that.
In fact, as The New York Times pointed out today, Soros, the so-called puppet master, has even been used as something of a political puppet by the government of Iran, which suspects the billionaire of plotting to overthrow that nation’s government.
Still, back in the United States, it is conservatives like Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin who rail the loudest about Soros’ influence and designs on America’s future. And the heart of the critique is perhaps best summed up by Beck himself, who stated on his program that “not only does [Soros] want to bring America to her knees financially, he wants to reap obscene profits off us as well.”
Related Articles
- International Jew George Soros Has Infiltrated the Palin Organization [Plants] (gawker.com)
- Randy Scheunemann, Sarah Palin Adviser, Bankrolled By George Soros (huffingtonpost.com)
- Does Glenn Beck think Palin is a Nazi collaborator? (dailykos.com)
