“If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble,” Soros once wrote. When asked to elaborate on that passage by The Independent, Soros said, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of God, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”
“Since I began to live it out.” For those who have followed his career and socio-political endeavors, this pretentious statement is not taken lightly. Soros has proven that with the vast resources of money at his command he has the ability to make the once unthinkable normal. His work as a self-professed “amoral” financial speculator has left millions in poverty. He has overthrown governments throughout the world, pumping so much cash into shaping former Soviet republics to his liking that he has bragged that the former Soviet Empire is now the “Soros Empire” (although that “Empire” did not last for very long; when he no longer served the former Soviets’ purposes, his Empire was taken away from him).
Now that “god” – Soros – has decided that George W. Bush has to go. The controversial billionaire has been proclaiming that defeating George W. Bush is the “central focus” of his life. He has written that he always “felt that modern society in general and America in particular suffer from a deficiency of values.” Only fundamental changes in our way of life will satisfy him, and he is spending millions to make those changes a reality.
With Soros’ pal Hillary Clinton promising the New York Post that the 2004 election, will be decided by “outside forces – something unforeseen that suddenly happens – that tilts the election one way or the other,” one wonders to what, or whom, she is referring.
“Of course what I do could be called meddling because I want to promote an open society,” he told Hemispheres magazine. “An open society transcends national sovereignty.” [emphasis added] And he has more tools at his disposal than you’d suspect. “Although I remain a champion of losing causes, how much closer I have come to realizing them than when I first started!” he wrote a few years ago.
Soros attempts at self-exposition can get pretty creepy at times, like in this passage from Underwriting Democracy: “I feel I must maintain a separation between myself and my persona. Without it I and my persona would be endangered…I hold my persona in high regard, from both a subjective and an objective point of view.”
Soros summed himself up this way while talking to biographer Michael Kaufman: “I am kind of a nut who wants to have an impact.”
This is not Soros’ only fantastic admission.
“Next to my fantasies about being God, I also have very strong fantasies of being mad,” Soros once confided on British television. “In fact, my grandfather was actually paranoid. I have a lot of madness in my family. So far I have escaped it.”
DIARY OF A MADMAN
Growing up in Nazi-occupied Hungary, a 14-year-old George Soros once saw two dead bodies hanging from lampposts. “This is what happens to a Jew who hides,” read a sign attached to one of the bodies. The other body carried the warning, “This is what happens to a Christian who hides Jews.” Soros may have met the same fate if his father had not obtained fake identities for himself, his wife, and his two sons. The family spilt up and George survived the war under the assumed identity of a gentile boy, Sandor Kiss. At 17, just as the Iron Curtain was descending, George and his father managed to get out to Switzerland, where they became delegates to an Esperanto Conference. (Esperanto is the artificial language invented in the Twenties to unite a fractured world, which Soros until recently lobbied the European Community to adopt as its common language.)
From Bern, bright little George, again with the help of his father, managed to reach London and to enter the London School of Economics. He slipped out of a Russian-occupied section of Austria and headed for London
It’s a harrowing tale, filled with many close calls. Which is all the more reason why reading Soros’ latest book, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, is so disconcerting. Soros has adopted strange and hyperbolic language in describing today’s America as a fascist Fourth Reich with September 11 serving as our Reichstag fire. “How could a single event, even if it involved three thousand civilian casualties, have such a far-reaching effect?” he writes. We are now, Soros writes, a nation of “victims turning perpetrators,” likening our reaction to the terrorist attacks to the crimes committed by the Germans because of their nation’s mistreatment at Versailles.
Soros is so worried that we might use the horror of September 11 as an excuse to fight terrorists that he raises the specter of America as a neo-Nazi state, thus demeaning both the horrors of September 11 and the Holocaust. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans,” Soros told the Washington Post, adding that Bush’s rhetoric reminded him of Nazi slogans such as, Der Feind Hort mit (“The enemy is listening”). Today’s America is a “threat to the world,” run by a Republican Party which is the arbiter of an unholy alliance between “market fundamentalists” and “religious fundamentalists.” We have become a “supremacist” nation, Soros contends, led by a man who “has a simplistic view of what is right and what is wrong.”
Even more shocking is Soros’ apparent attempt to have the Americans denied the right to defend themselves. “Usually when victims turn perpetrators, they are unaware of what they are doing,” Soros, the armchair psychiatrist, condescendingly posits. “That is the case with the American public today. Most people believe that terrorism poses a threat to our personal and national existence” – Is there some any proof to the contrary? – “and that in waging war on terrorism we are acting in self-defense. The idea that we may have been transformed from victims to perpetrators must be rather shocking to most of us.” The financier’s cherished principles of open society “recognize that we may be wrong.”
Some Americans might take issue with Soros’ implication that there is a very real chance that al-Qaeda is right and we are wrong. But Soros is black-and-white on the issue of George W. Bush. During a speech at Columbia University’s commencement ceremonies, Soros, per usual, prattled on about his hatred for George W. Bush, but without his much-beloved caveat about his own fallibility. “If President Bush is reelected, we must ask the question, ‘What is wrong with us?’” he said. According to George Soros, we must accept the possibility that al-Qaeda is right, but anyone who votes for Bush is wrong without fail.
“When President Bush says, as he does frequently, that freedom will prevail, in fact he means that America will prevail,” he writes, leading one to wonder who Soros would prefer to see “prevail.” Saddam Hussein? Osama bin Laden? Bush endorses “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.” Soros dismisses this as “Orwellian Doublespeak,” which he recognizes because he “grew up with it in Hungary first under Nazi and later Communist rule.”
However, Soros has recently purveyed the very “Orwellian Doublespeak” he condemns in others. Take, for example, the following transcript from a CNN appearance earlier this year with Wolf Blitzer.
SOROS: I have also been accused of comparing Bush to a Nazi. And I did not do it. I would not do it, exactly because I have lived under a Nazi regime. So I know the difference. But how come that I’m accused of that?
BLITZER: Who accused you of that?
SOROS: The Republican National Commission [sic.], or whatever, and a number of newspaper articles. And I — you know, I think I really — I’m upset about being accused of that. And I’m upset that I have to defend myself against this kind of accusation.
The first half of his new book is spent pointing out the alleged similarities between the Bush administration and Nazi Germany. CNN, as usual, worked overtime looking for a way to spin his talking points for the Left.
BLITZER: I think what the articles that I read suggested, because of you having lived through the Nazi era, you have a special responsibility to educate people who didn’t live through that. And I think the suggestion — at one point, you had made some sort of allusion to your own personal background in explaining why you were so critical of the president.
SOROS: That’s exactly right. And then that has been distorted that I’m comparing the president to a Nazi.
Let’s go to the book: Early in The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros argues that September 11 removed the obstacles to Bush’s long-planned “unilateral American dominance” of the world. “President Bush declared war on terrorism, and the nation lined up behind its president,” Soros explains. “Then the Bush administration proceeded to exploit the terrorist attack for its own purposes. To silence criticism and keep the nation united behind the president, the administration deliberately fostered the fear that had gripped the country.”
Less than a half dozen pages later, Soros gives us the following short history of Nazi Germany: “Hitler rose to power by capitalizing on a wave of resentment caused by an onerous peace treaty and runaway inflation. He appealed to the German people’s sense of being victimized…Whether the German’s sense of being victimized was imaginary or not.”
The two sound quite similar. Why else would he use Hitler, Stalin, and George W. Bush as his three examples of proponents of “Orwellian Doublespeak”? The Soros-funded pressure group MoveOn.org posted ads on its website that explicitly compared Bush to Hitler. And the campaign is working. One Democrat who refused to be named, told U.S. News and World Report that – coming from Soros – the claim that Bush is a Nazi was more credible. “I’m not sure I disagree with him,” he said. “I’m not going to second-guess someone like Soros who has lived through the Holocaust.”
Soros has always had a fear of being called out, however, which is why he often prefers to fly under the radar. “With publicity you become wedded to your words,” Soros said. “They become difficult to retract.”
Soros’ use of his personal story to further his political agenda is nothing new. The international philanthropist routinely ties the causes he christens as worthwhile into the struggle of his early life in Hungary, and his crusade against Bush is no exception. Soros’ memory of those days spent under Nazi occupation is a bit sunnier than one might expect. “For me, this was the most exciting time of my life,” Soros has said many times. “For an adolescent to be in real danger, having a feeling he is inviolate, having a father acting as a hero and having an evil confronting you and getting the better of it, I mean, being in command of the situation, even though you’re in danger, but basically maneuvering successfully, what more can you ask for?”
His own father, too, would not escape his scorn late in life. Soros told The New Yorker that he was disappointed his father chose to fight death when he found out he had terminal cancer. Soros’ father, the man who saved Soros’ own life, “unfortunately wanted to live,” he said, adding that he was “kind of disappointed in him” and “wrote him off” over the whole issue. When his father did not die on George Soros’ terms, George let him die alone. Soros’ mother disappointed him severely on this point. After a rather vigorous questioning by Nazi authorities, Soros’ mother had an understandable near nervous breakdown, a show of weakness that Soros told the same magazine made him furious.
Later in life, running his philanthropic foundations in Eastern Europe, Soros once again couldn’t ask for anything more. “It was heroic, exciting, rewarding – and it was great fun,” Soros once told a reporter. “We were in the business of undermining the system. We would support anything.” [emphasis added.] His opposition to President Bush’s re-election and support for the Left makes perfect sense when viewed through this prism.
Soros says, “I don’t give to charity.” Indeed, while The New York Times, time and again, has described him as the world’s greatest philanthropist, he has denounced “philanthropy [which] goes against the grain because our civilization is built upon the pursuit of self interest, not any preoccupation with the interest of others.”
Thus, Soros has become the go-to guy for the Democratic Party.
From Robert Slater’s unauthorized biography:
“When Soros believed he was right about an investment, nothing could stop him. No investment position was too large. Holding back was for wimps. The worst error in Soros’ was not being too bold, but too conservative. ‘Why so little?’ was one of his favorite questions.”
If one thing is sure in American politics today, it’s that no one is going to ask Soros “Why so little?” Soros has dropped more than $15 million so far to defeat George W. Bush next November, and he has made it clear he is willing to spend more –much more. Soros, it seems, is approaching the 2004 election much the same way he would any other investment. The man has donated millions to MoveOn.org, a group originally formed to denounce what it termed the excessive public focus on Clinton’s personal life; to former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta’s new think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP); and to America Coming Together, a get-out-the-Democratic vote operation headed by former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal and Ellen Malcolm, president of the pro-abortion EMILY’s List. Malcolm, belying her feminist slant, confided to the Washington Post that the Soros donation was like, “getting his Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.” At the CAP launch party, Hillary Clinton was as hysterical as George Soros, announcing to the crowd that Bush and the Republicans were seeking to “erase the 20th Century.”
Although the above mentioned organizations are all 527s, and, therefore, not supposed to coordinate with any party or candidate, they and Soros leave little doubt in what they are attempting to do. Announcing the ACT donation, Soros explained that he made the donation because the group was an “effective way to mobilize society” and “convince people to go to the polls.” In other words: Get out the vote. But Soros and his ego couldn’t let it lie there and keep up the appearance of non-partisanship:
“I believe deeply in the values of an open society,” Soros said. “For the past 15 years I have focused on fighting for these values abroad. Now I am doing it in the United States. The fate of the world depends on the United States and President Bush is leading us in the wrong direction.”
As Foundation Watch reports, Soros may complain about President Bush’s “Pioneers” and “Rangers” who solicit and bundle $2000 donations from friends, but his friends bring quite a bit more cash to the table:
“Soros’ donation to ACT became a catalyst for more donations. The morning after the announcement, Peter Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Insurance Corporation, a heavy contributor to other Soros pet initiatives, such as drug legalization, pledged $10 million to ACT; Rob Laser, founder and CEO of Real Networks, promised $2 million; Rob McKay, president of the McKay Family Foundation donated $1 million; and Lewis and Dorothy Cullman pledged $500,000. Other donors include Patricia Bauman, head of the Bauman Family Foundation, and Anne Bartley, former president of the Rockefeller Family Fund. Thanks to Soros and his wealthy network, ACT raised $23.5 million in 24 hours.”
These organizations crow about being political “think-tanks” poised to become the next Heritage Foundation or CATO Institute, but as Defense Advisory Board member Richard Perle pointed out in Newsday, these 527s are more political than ideological. “George Soros says publicly that he wants to defeat George Bush,” Perle said. “These are not scholars.”
ACT, for example, a group that steadfastly denies it is violating federal law by working on behalf of the Kerry campaign, brags on its website that it is currently, “laying the groundwork to defeat George W. Bush and elect Democrats.”
It certainly appears the Kerry campaign is coordinating with these groups – or at least sharing resources with them. Former ACT staffer Rodney Shelton is now Kerry’s Arkansas state director seems a bit odd. Isolated incident? Nope. Kerry’s former campaign manager Jim Jordan is now on staff at ACT. And Zach Exley recently left the upper echelons of MoveOn.org to work for Kerry. “It’s inevitable that Exley is going to be using MoveOn folks and information for the Kerry campaign. The guy was their opposition research guy,” a Bush campaign staffer told the Washington Prowler. “The RNC has been saying all along that these guys have been working together, so now the guy responsible for all those anti-Bush ads on TV and the Web is essentially doing the same thing for the Kerry camp? Soros probably has an office in Kerry campaign headquarters by now.”
Republican operatives, predictably, see Soros’ activities in a similar light. “It’s incredibly ironic that George Soros is trying to create a more open society by using an unregulated, under-the-radar-screen, shadowy, soft-money group to do it,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said. “George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party.”
Some of this might seem strange in light of the fact that a mere two years ago Soros described the influence of large cash donations in politics as “a fundamental crisis in democratic self-government.” At that time, Soros doled out more than $18 million to various campaign finance groups to get large donations out of politics. Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a group that received donations from Soros, expressed disappointment to Foundation Watch at the news of the big donations. “I’m sorry that Mr. Soros chose to make such a huge contribution for a specific effort to defeat Mr. Bush, given the very valuable role he played in supporting efforts to enact the soft-money ban.” Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity went further, telling Foundation Watch, “I have a hard time seeing what the difference is between a soft-money donor to a party and a big 527 donor, especially when both give million-dollar checks.”
Was Soros being facetious when he okayed a 2000 Open Society Institute report that claimed one of the group’s major goals was to get “states to experiment with various approaches to reduce the pressure of money on elections and legislation, ranging from improved disclosure to full public financing of campaigns”?
Soros’ 1995 book Soros on Soros contains a clue as to what he may be thinking: “I do not accept the rules imposed by others…I am a law-abiding citizen, but I recognize that there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don’t apply.” Clearly, Soros considers himself as someone who is able to determine when the “normal rules” should and shouldn’t apply – including Campaign Finance Reform laws.
Democrats are so hungry for a win in 2004, they don’t care whether George Soros is following the rules this time around or not. One “Democratic operative” told U.S. News & World Report, “[Republicans] don’t accept the legitimacy of political opposition. These people will do anything to gain and hold power. So I’m not exactly feeling full of ethical scruples as we fight for survival.”
This is the George Sorosization of the Democratic party. As we will see, this idea of “scruples” being for the other guy has been central to Soros’ philosophy in business, philanthropy, and foreign policy.
The Bush administration has apparently yet to take Soros’ threats/promises seriously. In September 2003 Soros was invited to speak at one of the State Department’s Open Forums. During his speech he got big laughs with several joking references to his plans for George W. Bush’s defeat come next November before turning on the hyper-internationalist rhetoric, including his proposed “modification of the concept of sovereignty,” because “sovereignty is basically somewhat anachronistic.” Supporters and defenders of the United States Constitution should take note.
Soros’ newfound love for the United Nations is a perfect example of how Soros used macro-level institutions for his own purposes. These days he criticizes Bush for failing to get UN approval for U.S. actions in Iraq and elsewhere. He wants the body to serve as a restraint to American power. But when the UN held back Soros’ foundation in the mid- and late-90s he had a very different view:
“I see the United Nations as ineffective and wasteful. In my philanthropic work whenever I come up against any United Nations agencies, I give them wide berth with one exception: the UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees). Since the intervention in Bosnia, my feelings have become even more negative. I regard the role of the United Nations as positively evil.” [emphasis added.]
When the U.S. bombed the Serbs without a UN authorizing resolution, Soros praised it as a victory for his cherished “open society.” Four years later when the U.S. went to Iraq without an explicit UN resolution (there was, after all, an authorizing resolution passed in 2003), Soros condemned working outside of the UN in the strongest terms.
And some conservatives are looking at Soros’ words and cash warily, recommending a more cautious approach to the “nut.” American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene calls Soros the “Daddy Warbucks of the radical Left” who “opposes everything President Bush stands for.”
“He opposed the war in Iraq and he bankrolls every wacko liberal cause from population and gun control schemes to drug legalization, radical feminism, and one-world globalism. Soros makes Ted Turner look conservative by comparison,” Keene said.
Indeed, Soros’ unadulterated hatred of George W. Bush has led him to use his vast fortune to prop up the other side in the War on Terror.
“George Soros’ funding is hardly reserved to the mainstream,” FrontPage Magazine editor Ben Johnson writes. “[Soros’] Open Society Institute [has] funded the fantasies of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Research Institute. This is the same group that falsely accused the Justice Department of inhumane treatment of a Muslim prisoner, claiming they forcibly extracted numerous teeth, brutalized him and forced him to eat pork – all later proven to be lies. ADC Communications Director Hussein Ibish has defended Palestinian suicide bombers (as long as they don’t target ‘civilians’; how big of you, Hussein!), praised Hamas for ‘running hospitals and schools and orphanages,’ defended Sami al-Arian and praised Mao Tse-tung.”
Soros, through more than $13 million in donations to the Tides Foundation (which it is worth noting is also a major recipient for Soros’ many liberal projects as well as one of potential first lady Teresa Heinz Kerry’s favorite foundations, with $4 million in donations and counting), has also supported the Council for American-Islamic Relations, a group that serves as an apologist for nearly every terrorist group in existence. One joint venture between the Tides Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Institute is the Democratic Justice Fund, which, as Ben Johnson explains, “seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration to the United States, particularly from countries designated by the State Department as ‘terrorist nations.’”
Soros also gave $100,000 to People for the American Way, which, along with the openly communist group, International ANSWER helped create the over-the-top “peace” rallies last year. “PAW created United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and chose as its ‘mainstream’ leader Leslie Cagan, who was a member of the Communist Party after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Ben Johnson noted. “She describes Castro’s Cuba as the ideal state.”
Over the last six years Soros has also given more than $120,000 to the Center for the Study of Constitutional Rights (CCR), a group that not only openly opposes the War on Terror and America’s right to defend herself, but has also lobbies directly to reduce hurdles for people seeking U.S. visas from terrorist hotspots around the globe. In official literature, the CCR contends that “Bush’s quest for world domination” is not “an acceptable ambition.” Our foreign policy, they write, should be focused on “eradicating hunger, poverty, disease, homelessness, and environmental degradation and pollution.” “Polices that promote and achieve racial, economic and social justice,” CCR claims, “are the best deterrents to hatred, violence, terrorism and war.”
Cavorting with such organizations allows Soros to get applause rather than ridicule for his perverse take on America. For example, at a recent “Take Back America” conference put on by the far-left Campaign for America‘s Future, Soros compared prisoners being made to wear women’s underwear at Abu Ghraib prison to the Sept. 11 attacks.
After being introduced by Hillary Rodham Clinton (“We need people like George Soros, who is fearless and willing to step up when it counts,” she said), Soros dramatically told the cheering crowd that, “There is, I’m afraid, a direct connection between those two events [9/11 and Abu Ghraib], because the way President Bush conducted the war on terror converted us from victims into perpetrators.”
The idea that Soros found “most galling” was that the United States “went to war in Iraq for the sake of the Iraqi people.” Of course, the fact that the antiwar Soros obviously hadn’t cared a whit about the very real atrocities committed in that same jail for decades under Saddam went unnoticed by him, his open society and in this savagely anti-Bush forum. No amount of good done in Iraq will ever be enough for Soros and his Democratic cronies. They eagerly wait for American blood, American defeat, and are the first to see the hint of either in a given day’s headlines.
Nevertheless, these organizations at their core are the logical end of Soros’ sordid thought processes, of course. Soros, in order to fight Bush, must see him as evil. By nature, this must mean Bush’s (i.e. America’s) enemies have the moral high ground. Soros has a hero complex. As he wrote in Underwriting Democracy, “Doing good may be noble, but fighting evil can be fun.” And Soros is having a delusional blast.
“Frankly, I don’t think I’ll need to do a lot more,” Soros recently bragged to USA Today. “I now take the defeat of Bush more or less for granted.”
A QUESTION OF INFLUENCE
George Soros has built George W. Bush up in his mind as a modern day personification of the threats he faced as a child. Psychologically, Soros needs to do that because he won’t allow him to get involved in anything short of epic. But what is the real problem with the Bush administration? The evidence suggests it has much less to do with the Bush Doctrine and much more to do with his Soros’ loss of influence in the post-Clinton world.
“I am particularly interested in changes in the rules of the game,” Soros once said. “I am looking for that new game and the new rules. I can anticipate these periods of regime change when something really new is happening. In the United States we say that, ‘These things are self-evident.’ Well, nothing is self evident.”
Soros’ main concern is that someone be elected who is indebted to him enough to pick up the phone when he calls. John Kerry is obviously willing to be that guy: While both Soros and Kerry were on vacation at their neighboring estates in Sun Valley, Idaho, they chatted on the phone, but avoided a personal meeting “because of how it would be interpreted,” Soros told USA Today. Thus they kept up the appearance that they are not violating the IRS code, which forbids non-profits from intervening “directly or indirectly, in any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”
The OSI website continues this pathetic charade: “George Soros’ private political activities are wholly separate from the Open Society Institute,” it reads. “OSI is a nonpartisan, nonpolitical entity in accordance with U.S. laws for tax-exempt organizations. Soros, as a private individual, is entitled to use his after-tax personal funds to support political candidates or parties within the parameters of U.S. election law. Any public statements on political issues are also made solely in his personal capacity. The Open Society Institute is not consulted or otherwise involved, and OSI is neither able nor permitted to comment.” Nothing in Soros’s life is “wholly separate” from everything else, of course.
But Soros does not want to be president. He wants to find “a new game,” because Soros has learned that a world in flux offers many opportunities for folks as powerful as himself. He makes no bones about this, consistently mocking world leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan who refused to meet with him. In books and speeches, Soros speaks endlessly of how much better off the world would be if only those in power had listened to him.
In Underwriting Democracy he writes, for example, of “desperately” trying to “reach President Bush” in 1991 before his meeting with Gorbachev in Malta. “But I only got as far as Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger,” he laments. “That is when I decided to write Opening the Soviet System.”
One of the reasons why Soros might hate Bush the Younger so much is that he spurned Soros’ advances while his father was in power. Harken Energy was partially owned by George Soros when the company bought George W. Bush’s Spectrum 7 in 1986. Queried about the reasoning behind this buyout by Nation reporter David Corn (himself author of a best-selling Bush-bashing book), Soros claimed the deal was about influencing American policy: “Bush was supposed to bring in the [Persian Gulf] connection,” Soros said. “But it didn’t come to anything. We were buying political influence. That was it. Bush was not much of a businessman.” [emphasis added.] Admitting to purchasing political influence is an odd tack for a proponent of “campaign finance reform” to take.
Although these days, Soros’ connections are getting quite a bit more attention than they did in the 1990s, he was nevertheless a high profile figure by the end of the Clinton reign. In fact, Soros and Hillary Clinton became allies. One of the few people Hillary would see when the Lewinsky scandal broke was George Soros. During his interview with 60 Minutes footage of Soros and Hillary Clinton walking through a Haitian village flitted across the screen, complete with Hillary Clinton introducing Soros to everyone who came within five feet of them. In 1998, Newsweek suggested that after her husband’s time in the Oval Office came to an end, Hillary would probably seek employment in the non-profit sector: “Friends daydream about [Hillary] becoming head of UNICEF, or even UN secretary-general,” political insider Howard Fineman wrote. “More likely: Some sort of global foundation, aided by friends such as financier George Soros or World Bank president James Wolfenson.” Instead we ended up with Senator Hillary, a cause Soros likewise contributed heavily to, both with a maximum contribution to Friends of Hillary and tens of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as well as the Democratic National Committee, which considers Hillary its shining star and possible 2008 presidential candidate.
But she was by far not his only admirer.
“I like to influence policy,” Soros told television talk show host Charlie Rose in 1995. “I was not able to get to George Bush. But now I think I have succeeded with my influence…I do now have great access in [the Clinton] administration. There is no question about this. We actually work together as a team. Forget NATO now.” Soros went on to brag to Time magazine in 1997 that, “my influence has continued to grow and I do have access to most people I want to have access to.”
Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, called Soros “a national resource – indeed, a national treasure” and described the billionaire as a sort of shadow arm of the State Department. “I would say that it [Soros’ foreign policy] is not identical to the foreign policy of the U.S. government, but it’s compatible with it,” Talbott told The New Yorker. “It’s like working with a friendly, allied, independent entity, if not a government. We try to synchronize our approach to the former Communist countries with Germany, France, Great Britain, and with George Soros.” When Soros opened his own D.C. office to be close to the action, one of his minions explained that it would serve as “his State Department.”
Soros wrote memos on every foreign policy and monetary issue imaginable, and these memos were read widely at the very highest echelons of the Clinton White House. Soros was has also used the services of the Washington lobbying firm Raffaelli, Spees, Springer & Smith, where he was represented by none other than current Democratic National Committee Chairman and Clinton hack Terry McAuliffe. Between his payments to McAuliffe the lobbying executive and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he rained down on various official Democratic PACs, Soros was clearly able to purchase himself quite a bit of clout in the Democratic Party, and adoration/co-dependency that continues to this day. Soros needs the Democrats in office to be taken seriously as a State Department unto himself, and Democrats needs Soros’ dollars to win elections.
“If I spend enough, I will make it right,” Soros is known to say. And true to his words he is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to remodel society. Often, his giving is contingent upon matching grants, as is his October 21th well publicized $500 million “conditional” offering to Russia. A fact the New York Times managed to ignore while praising “Citizen Soros” for “reflecting American values” with his grand international philanthropy.
“My biggest risk lies in the process of acknowledging that I am becoming powerful and influential because I have a lot of money,” Soros once said, although one wonders what good the supposed self-delusion does if he can articulate the reality of the situation.
And indeed, Soros often prefers to paint himself as an outsider on a mission to change the dominant paradigm. But, clearly, he is an insider. As journalist Neil Clark pointed out in the New Statesman, not exactly a bastion of conservative thought, Soros has invested more that $100 million in the Carlyle Group, where he’s rubbed shoulders with movers and shakers including, “former secretary of state James Baker and the erstwhile defense secretary Frank Carlucci, George Bush, Sr. and, until recently, the estranged relatives of Osama Bin Laden.” Still not convinced? Soros’ Open Society Institute’s office in Washington, D.C. was manned until recently by Morton H. Halperin, who worked in the Clinton, Nixon and Johnson administrations, serving as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy at the National Security Council under Clinton. Where is Halperin now? He’s vice-president at the Soros funded Center for American Progress, which is not coordinating its attacks on Bush with Kerry or the Democrats, of course. These are all mere coincidences. Behind the curtain, paying for all this, is Soros.
Soros has written that none of this matters, that he is only contributing to “independent organizations that by law are forbidden to coordinate their activities with the political parties or candidates.” MoveOn.org compares George W. Bush to Hitler and that is simply, according to Soros, a mere coincidence, and that he, Soros, is only “getting more people involved in the national debate over Bush’s policies.” Soros is too smart to really believe his own words when he writes that McCain-Feingold, “minimizes or eliminates the ability to purchase influence in exchange for” his contributions. More laughably Soros adds, – forgetting his earlier claims that he gives to buy influence – that he doesn‘t, “seek such influence. My contributions are made in what I believe to be the common good.”
As we have already seen, Soros believes the common good would be best served by defeating George Bush, electing John Kerry and the implementation of the “Soros Doctrine.” So explain to us again how these donations are not baldly political?
Can Democrats still possibly believe Soros’ millions come without strings attached? Indeed, he says quite forthrightly in his latest book that he intends to replace the Bush Doctrine with the “Soros Doctrine.” Since Soros is not registered as a lobbyist, yet is nevertheless trying to influence politicians with mounds of cash, this seems a bit suspicious. Further, does that sound like the kind of man who is planning to help defeat Bush and then step back and let a new Democratic president do as he wishes? In a 1994 interview with the New York Times, for example, Soros was extremely candid about why he does what he does in business, philanthropy, life. “I still consider myself selfish and greedy,” Soros said. “I am not putting myself forward as any kind of saint. I have very healthy appetites and I put myself first.”
During an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, liberal journalist Douglas Brinkley, author of the recent fawning tribute to John Kerry “Tour of Duty,” suggested Soros was interested in something bigger than this one election. “Soros is just somebody who has not just a lot of money but also has a large ego, and…wants to be seen as somebody who not just ousts President Bush, but becomes a kind of savior of a new progressive America.”
A cursory glance at Federal Election Commission records shows Soros had no interest in which of the several Democratic presidential candidates won the primaries. Last summer Soros spread cash around to the campaigns of Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Bob Graham, and, of course, the ultimate victor, John Kerry. He spread his money around like an octopus swinging his tentacles at a hapless school of fish–shoot off in enough directions to make sure you capture your prey. Once when asked which side of the Russian Revolution his father Tivadar had been on, Soros answered simply, “Oh, both sides, of course. He had to be to survive.”