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Dems plan $40M hit on McCain

Wealthy Democrats are preparing a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Sen. John McCain. And it will be led by David Brock, the former investigative reporter who first gained fame in the 1990s as a right-wing, anti-Clinton journalist.

The planned campaign is the product of a shakeup in the top ranks of the struggling independent Democratic groups. Brock, now best known as the ex-conservative founder of the liberal group Media Matters, last month quietly assumed the chairmanship of what’s expected to be the main vehicle for independent Democratic attacks on McCain, now called Progressive Media USA.

The move comes after the groups that had been expected to spearhead attacks on McCain — the Fund for America and Progressive Media USA’s previous incarnation, the Campaign to Defend America — failed to raise the money needed to dent McCain’s armor.

“We’re a little behind where we need to be,” he said.

But after a dinner Tuesday night at the Manhattan apartment of liberal megadonor George Soros, at which Brock and consultant Paul Begala laid out the group’s plans, Brock said his group now has commitments worth $7.5 million — almost twice what the Fund for America is expected to report raising in the first quarter of this year. He said the group would begin running ads before it meets its $40 million goal.

Brock suggested that the group could do the work of a press corps that, he says, has “fallen down on the job” when it comes to McCain.

Brock’s most recent book is called “Free Ride: John McCain and the Media.”

Brock wouldn’t detail Progressive Media USA’s strategy, and stressed that — as required by his group’s nonprofit status — the spending would be on a mix of direct electoral politics and issue ads with no direct connection to the race.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9514.html

Horowitz’s new book, The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Have Seized Control of the Democratic Party (Nelson Current, 2006)

HOROWITZ: Media Matters is run by David Brock, who made a career, by his own account, out of lying and smearing people.

I have never encountered a group with lower ethical standards than Media Matters. Soros and John Podesta, who was [former President Bill] Clinton’s chief of staff and runs the Center for American Progress, set this group up and funded it. It is now — they’ve opened a new office in Colorado. This is part of a Soros plan to take over the political structure of the United States, to end the war on terror as we know it, and to, as he puts it, burst the bubble of American supremacy. These are people — this is really the left-wing agenda, that America is the problem, that America has to be defeated. But now, it has behind it — it’s not just the [filmmaker] Michael Moores and [anti-war activist] Cindy Sheehans. It has behind it a billionaire who has put together the most powerful juggernaut in the history of American politics.

He’s (Soros) also said that the capitalist system is the number one problem. Soros, when he was young, the family name was Schwartz. It was changed to Soros in 1936. And when he was a young man in fascist Hungary, he came under the protection of one of the fascist leaders of Hungary, and they went around — he was a young man, to be said in his defense, there — but he went around confiscating Jewish property prior to sending the Jews who owned it to the gas chambers. Now, he was asked on 60 Minutes by [co-host] Steve Kroft if he felt any guilt over that, and he said none whatsoever.

This is a man who is used to power and is a megalomaniac. I mean he said his ambition is to be the conscience of the world. How mania — megano — megalomaniacal is that? He wants to be the conscience of the world, that means he wants — that is the socialist idea, that they are going to reorder all of us, and make us, you know, create God’s kingdom on earth by political means. That’s why they’re dangerous.