RightOnline: No Love for George Soros
Saturday, August 15, 2009 at 12:22 pm
PITTSBURGH – The response of American for Prosperity activists to the charge that they’re using corporate money to stoke a fake public revolt has been, as I noted yesterday, outright mockery. Phil Kerpen added a little spin to this in his speech, accusing liberals of projection.
“How many of you were angry before we told you to be angry?” he asked, rhetorically. He explained to them that “George Soros funds a group called the Center for American Progress” and explained how Soros-funded bloggers blew up the Right Principles memo on health care town hall disruption (actually, that was Brian Beutler of TPM).
Direct transcript:
We didn’t manufacture any of this anger. It was all out there. But I’ll tell you what was manufactured! What was manufactured was this talking point from the left that said you guys are fake.
Now, where did that come from? George Soros funds a group called the Center for American Progress that has a blog called ThinkProgress. And they’ve got a memo, they called it a secret memo, it was posted on someone’s website. Not a member of our organization, not a member of any other organizations I know of. And they said that all of you guys were following this guy’s memo, that you were manufactured. These Soros-funded bloggers, they put it out. As soon as they put it out, the DNC picked it up, they sent it all around town in a press release. They sent it all around town to every liberal group.
This was Friday. By the following Monday, the New York Times was reporting it, every Democrat in Congress was talking about it, the White House was talking about it. Now, who was manufacturing talking points? Who was manufacturing anger? They’re using George Soros’s money to manufacture this whole story.
Actually, the liberal campaign to discredit AFP and FreedomWorks resembles the long campaign to turn Soros, a well-known financier who’s donated more than $6 billion to various causes (and funds the Open Society Institute, which has given grants to TWI’s publisher), into a Nazi-collaborating, drug-legalizing, free speech-squelching man-behind-the-curtain of every liberal plot.
Kerpen closed with a surprise attack on Cass Sunstein, the president’s still-unconfirmed nominee for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein, said Kerpen, wanted to enact “notice and take-down” that would allow readers to scrub posts from the internet by alerting “the government.” It’s a strange mutation of an idea Sunstein proposed in “Nudge,” but he’s probably not surprised that a book about “libertarian paternalism” has been latched onto by the right as a blueprint for fascism.
This post was updated to note TWI’s publisher, Center for Independent Media, has received grants from the Open Society Institute. A list of Center for Independent Media’s supporters is available here.
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8 Comments
Comment posted August 15, 2009 @ 5:49 pm
Interesting article, I believe Americans are trusting and forgiving of the Gov't to a point. But when our representatives betray our trust (that they understand what bills say, not) and vote for them w/o knowing what the bills wholly contain,the congress and senate are voting party lines and not for the good of the people; therefore corrupting the purpose of representation and only purpetrating their own selfish interest.
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Comment posted August 15, 2009 @ 7:10 pm
If Sunstein's name comes up again in your reporting, don't forget that there is a progressive critique of him — check out the Center for Progressive Reform's report, at http://www.progressivereform.org/SunsteinOIRA.cfm, and this statement from Clean Air Watch at http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/01/10/ca….
The controversy — among progressives, rather than rightwing cranks — has been reported in LA Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/26/nation/…, and Bloomberg, http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/400385_skrzyck….
Now, some of the rightwingers who harp about “death panels” have started to pick up on Sunstein's embrace of what progressives likewise criticize as the “senior death discount” — applying a lower value of life for the elderly than for the young, so that regulations that save primarily older people's lives are WORTH LESS than regulations that protect primarily younger people.
Comment posted August 16, 2009 @ 6:56 pm
Wow…Right Online: Birth of Hate Group?
The stupid it burns!
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Comment posted August 18, 2009 @ 7:27 pm
The claim that George Soros was a Nazi collaborator is false and deeply offensive. As a 13-year-old child Soros was hidden with an official of the Ministry of Agriculture. Soros’s father helped hide the official’s Jewish wife and the official agreed to let young Soros pose as his Christian godson in return. This is how Soros was able to survive the Nazi occupation. On one occasion the official went to inventory the estate of a Jewish family that had fled Hungary under duress. He brought the child in his charge along rather than leaving him alone in Budapest. To construe this as Soros “collaborating with Nazis” is false, malicious and deeply misleading. Anybody interested in more detail can look at page 37 of the biography of Soros by Michael Kaufman “The Messianic Billionaire”. Anyone interested more broadly in what Soros supports can look at http://www.soros.org
With the help of his barber, Tivadar found a place for George with a man named Baumbach, an employee of the Ministry of Agriculture. Baumbach, who was of German origin, had a Jewish wife and was paying to have her hidden in the countryside. Tivadar paid him to take George into his home, ostensibly as his godson. Tivadar turned over the apartment facing Parliament to his Gentile secretary and moved into the secret room.
Within days of arriving at Baumbach’s, George went for a walk into the Buda hills, where lost in a daydream he moved beyond the city limits. When he turned back, he was stopped by Hungarian gendarmes. “I remember it quite clearly,” he recalled. “I had just arrived at Baumbach’s…I had walked too far. I was frightened but nothing happened. It was the first test of my using a false name and I passed it.”
While he was living with Baumbach as Sandor Kiss, an event occurred that more than half a century later would become the basis of charges that George Soros, the international financier and billionaire, had somehow collaborated with Nazi occupiers of his homeland and had exploited his fellow Jews. The issue was raised in a bizarre television profile and interview of Soros aired on the CBS television program 60 Minutes in December of 1998. In the segment, Steve Kroft, the interviewed, noted with prosecutorial gusto that George’s father had “bribed a government official to swear that you were his godson,” and added that this survival strategy “carried a heavy price tag.” For, he continued, “as hundreds of thousands of Jews were being shipped off to the Nazi death camps, a thirteen-year-old George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.” Visibly dumbfounded by the line of questioning, Soros could only manage to say that he had no role in the seizure of property and was merely a spectator. To underscore Kroft’s point, film footage showed masses of Hungarian Jews being led away at gunpoint.
This is what actually happened. Shortly after George went to live with Baumbach, the man was assigned to take inventory on the vast estate of Mor Kornfeld, an extremely wealthy aristocrat of Jewish origin. The Kornfeld family had the wealth, wisdom and connections to be able to leave some of its belongings behind in exchange for permission to make their way to Lisbon. Baumbach was ordered to go to the Kornfeld estate and inventory the artworks, furnishings, and other property. Rather than leave his “godson” behind in Budapest for three days, he took the boy with him. As Baumbach itemized the material, George walked around the grounds and spent time with Kornfeld’s staff. It was his first visit to such a mansion, and the first time he rode a horse. He collaborated with no one and he paid attention to what he understood to be his primary responsibility: making sure that no one doubted that he was Sandor Kiss. Among his practical concerns was to make sure that no one saw him pee. (Michael T. Kaufman, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire (Alfred A. Knopf: New York 2002) 36-38.)
Comment posted September 5, 2009 @ 8:16 pm
The people I feared just left the government. I do trust President Obama not to do anything crazy, horrible, or illegal. That was not the case when Bush/Cheney were in office. As long as we have an honest President we will have a corrupt right-wing extremist plot to smear him and bring him down to their level. I will fight to keep him lifted up where he belongs while doing the people work, and not doing the wrong people's evil work.
Comment posted September 6, 2009 @ 9:24 pm
One thing you can be sure of…whatever the name is of any group that George Soros supports, the real intention is exaclty the opporsite of the name. Much like Obama putting names on initiatives that are the exact opposite of their real intention. He holds a “Fiscal Responsibilty” conference while signing a $700 billion, 100% debt-funded, pork-laden bill. Take notice anytime you see one of this administration's initiatives. He learned from his real idealistic leader…George Soros. The man behind Obama's (the annointed one's) smile
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