Abstract

The Soros Slander Campaign Continues

We return this week to the conservative crusade to destroy the reputation of financier and philanthropist George Soros. He has turned his attention to the United States, where he is spending as much as $15 million to help various liberal groups improve their efforts to expose the malfeasance of the President George W. Bush Administration and defeat it in the elections of 2004. The Republican National Committee has circulated a briefing paper on Capitol Hill in which Soros is referred to as "Lord of the Democrats" and the "Daddy Warbucks" of the drug legalization movement, and which highlights what it deems to be his controversial positions on abortion, gun control and the right to end one's own life. In Richard Mellon Scaife's NewsMax magazine, a writer named Richard Poe has extended the attack against the "somewhat loony" Soros, who, he says, "hates America" and is seeking to engineer a "coup" against Bush. Using unmistakably anti-Semitic tropes and metaphors, editor Tony Blankley appeared on Fox's Hannity & Colmes to call Soros a "robber baron" and "pirate capitalist." All of the above bespeaks the desperation that Republicans apparently feel at the prospect of being challenged by someone with the resources to make a difference in an election in which polls show that a majority of voters disapprove of Bush and that a plurality plan to vote for his opponent.