THE ANATOMY OF A SMEAR: How the Left is fighting to silence GLENN BECK

media.glennbeck.com ^ | June 22, 2010, for TOWNHALL July 2010 | Meredith Jessup

[Yosemitest]

THE ANATOMY OF A SMEAR:
How the Left is fighting to silence Glenn Beck
by Meredith Jessup

“Rule #11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.”
—Saul Alinsky's “Rules for Radicals”

We should’ve seen it coming.
As his Fox News Channel television audience exploded in 2009, it was only a matter of time
before the liberal Left organized itself into a full-court press against Glenn Beck.

Since the conservative radio phenom made the jump from CNN’s Headline News to FNC,
Beck has set cable ratings records, adding more fans to his radio audience of millions.
His five o’clock timeslot on Fox has grown to rival the primetime titans of cable news, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.
Though O’Reilly and Hannity are no strangers to hatred from liberals,
Glenn Beck’s “fusion of entertainment and enlightenment” incites a particularly unique level of vitriol
unmatched by any other television commentator today.

The concentrated disdain for Beck has also united the Left behind one common goal:
getting him off the air.
Various levels of the Left—
from grassroots organizers to the Obama White House
— are working in an all-hands-on-deck concert to discredit Beck with a barrage of attacks in a relentless smear campaign.

LET THE BOYCOTTS BEGIN

To Beck’s regular audience, his disregard for political correctness and adherence to no-nonsense common sense are refreshing.
To his detractors, he is a fear-mongering extremist whose opinions represent reckless “vitriolic rhetoric.”

When third-year University of Wisconsin law student Angelo Carusone was annoyed by Beck’s “controversial” opinions, he launched StopBeck.com —
an online effort aimed at pressuring advertisers to withdraw their commercial support from Beck’s broadcast on Fox
and, in turn, force Beck off the air.
Working from an office in his two-bedroom apartment in Madison, Wis., Carusone sends sound bites of Beck’s show to corporate sponsors
and questions whether their products and services should support Beck’s programming.
In many cases, this slight nudge is enough to make the targeted advertisers pull their commercials.
If advertisers don’t pull their support, Carusone uses his website and social networking sites to organize other Beck opponents—
including his nearly 8,000 followers on Twitter
—to bombard the companies with messages in support of a Beck advertising boycott.
And if the snowballing effect of thousands of outspoken anti-Beck activists doesn’t stir enough commotion for a company to relent,
Carusone picks up the phone to personally confront them.
In what he calls his “least flattering method of persuasion,” Carusone argues with corporate media executives until they give in.

StopBeck.com also claims that Beck
“uses his media platform to disseminate vitriolic hateful rhetoric and stoke racial anxieties,”
and the group works in conjunction with ColorofChange.org —
a group founded by dismissed Obama green jobs czar Van Jones
— in boycotting Beck’s commercial sponsors.
Both organizations disparaged Beck
for questioning President Obama’s personal motives in condemning the Cambridge, Mass., Police
for arresting Harvard professor Henry Gates in 2009.
ColorofChange.org Executive Director James Rucker told Townhall that the group’s goal has been
“to bring Beck’s pattern of race-baiting to advertisers’ attention,
to let them know about our members’ concerns
and to ask whether those companies feel comfortable enabling Beck’s rhetoric.”
But when rapper Kanye West infamously stated that President George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people” following Hurricane Katrina,
there was no boycott of West’s album sales.
And when pressed by Townhall about uber-Leftist comedian Bill Maher’s recent comments about
Barack Obama not being a “real black president”
because he didn’t carry a loaded pistol in his waistband,
Rucker and Color of Change did not respond.
By Color of Change’s own standards, these comments seem “repulsive and dismissive,”
yet Beck and Fox News remain the group’s only boycott targets.

Color of Change and StopBeck.com represent a small niche of the anti-Beck movement on the Left
that uses advertising dollars as leverage to silence what they refer to as Glenn Beck’s “brand of hate”—
a “brand” they've constructed by using selective interpretation of mere fragments of Beck’s contextual dialogue.

But the Left’s efforts in smearing and silencing Beck run well beyond the limits of these two online campaigns.
The complex structure of the Left’s Glenn Beck smear campaign also includes some familiar big players in liberal politics.

ENTER GEORGE SOROS’ MEDIA MATTERS

Beck is a daily fixture of self-described “progressive” media “monitor” Media Matters.
However, instead of pointing out factual errors in Beck’s programming,
Media Matters merely inserts its own political opinion.
Media Matters obsessively posts nearly a dozen anti-Beck stories on their website daily
and thrives on clipping apart Beck’s statements
to paint crude and incomplete pictures of Beck and his large devoted audience.

Media Matters also publishes media “research” on its site
that other liberal outlets pick up and disperse across the Internet and blogosphere.
Among these hard-hitting items:
• “Glenn Beck’s disturbing use of race and race-baiting”
• “Beck’s embrace of violent, anti-government rhetoric”
• “Beck’s slavery fetish”
• “Beck promotes book rife with anti-Semitism and racism”
• “Beck pushes bogus ‘evidence of socialism’ in Obama’s policies”

Media Matters joins StopBeck.com and Color of Change in supporting a widespread boycott of Beck’s programming and advertisers
and runs a daily list of companies who advertised during the Fox show.

Another group providing the Left with invaluable out-of-context quotes and blatantly slanted interpretations
to use in attacking Beck is John Podesta’s Center for American Progress (CAP), which talks about Beck “claiming [Van] Jones’ proverbial scalp”
and complains about Beck’s “vitriol” that is “increasingly allowed to infect our public discourse.”
Incidentally, Podesta’s CAP and Media Matters not only spread each other’s research, but also share staff.
In fact, Podesta was a pivotal figure in founding Media Matters.
And CAP’s Eric Alterman, who writes about Beck’s “hatred for sale,”
likes to remind readers that he’s a senior fellow at— surprise! —Media Matters.

Not surprisingly, Media Matters and the Center for American Progress share common donors
that keep operations running smoothly, including generous financial gifts from George Soros and his Open Society Institute.
Soros “affiliate” MoveOn.org has also joined in spreading the Left’s disdain for Beck,
including a joint venture with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
in constructing a fake broadcast video that pokes fun at Beck’s “conspiracy theories.”

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA ASSAULT

Saul Alinsky’s fifth “rule for radicals” says,
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
Against irrational ridicule, there is no defense and an enemy is forced into concessions.
Taking a page right out of Alinsky’s playbook, the Left uses various media outlets to push
not only its policy agenda but also to advance its campaign against Glenn Beck.

By himself, Beck represents a formidable opponent in the media market.
He’s a media giant in every sense of the word —
commanding a broad audience in radio, television, books and public appearances
— and it drives the Left and their friends in the mainstream media crazy.
On average, Beck’s five o’clock timeslot ratings wallop cable competitors CNN and MSNBC’s combined primetime line-up ratings.
When Beck had his regular show on HLN, the media could largely ignore him.
But when he was added to the Fox roster with the policies of a new Democratic administration to comment on,
Beck became an unstoppable force and Fox’s cable competitors and other mainstream media outlets have had to put up a concerted effort to drown out his success.

“Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it,” Alinsky wrote.
“Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies.
Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.”
Time magazine recently ran a cover story on Beck titled, “Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?” Time’s own Joe Klein lobbed a heavier accusation while appearing on MSNBC’s “The Chris Matthews Show,”
claiming that “people like Glenn Beck … rub right up close to being seditious.”

Further, Time’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, appeared on Joe Scarborough’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC to plug the magazine and personally attack Beck.
Beck’s work, he claimed, “plays a part in the lack of civility in political discourse,” Stengel said.
He also claimed Beck was stoking the public’s angst about many things,
including the fact that President Obama is an African-American.

The New York Times dubbed Beck “mad” and “apocalyptic.”
Veteran liberal journalist Cokie Roberts dubbed Beck
“a traitor to the American values he professes so loudly to defend”
and claimed he is
“corrupting the very essence of democracy.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow cherry-picked statements from Glenn Beck’s radio show to accuse him of lying about global warming (see “Maddow’s Snow Job” sidebar ).



---

MADDOW’S SNOW JOB
To illustrate how the liberal attack machine works,
follow this sequence of exchanges between MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and Glenn Beck:

Friday, Feb. 12: As the East Coast was pounded with record amounts of snow fall,
Beck joked on his morning radio program (in a stereotypical mobster voice, no less)
that God was sending people like Al Gore a message,
but noted that one large snowstorm does not prove or disprove anything.

Friday, Feb. 12: In a brief segment on her primetime MSNBC show, Maddow quotes Beck’s joke as if he were serious
in claiming the snowstorm disproves Al Gore’s global warming theory.
Maddow conveniently leaves out Beck’s comment that
“one storm does not prove anything.”

Monday, Feb. 15: Beck takes to the radio airwaves and responds to Maddow’s Friday segment,
calling her “dishonest” and reminding listeners
that his stereotypical fake mobster/God voice
was nothing more than a joke.
Beck implied that it was irresponsible for Maddow to present his joke as “evidence” in an attempt to discredit him.

Tuesday, Feb. 16: Maddow fires back at Beck:
“I think it’s between you and your God or you and your conscience
as to how much you’re willing to stir up Americans’ fear and prejudice for profit.
But it’s between you and me
when you accuse me of lying.
I didn’t lie. Back o! .”

Wednesday, Feb. 17: Beck plays the audio of his original comments,
proving that Maddow had indeed selectively edited the audio
in order to suggest Beck based his opinion of global warming on one large snowstorm:
“The very next line that I said was
‘you’re an idiot if you believe this one storm in Washington proves there’s no global warming.’
I mean, it’s the very next line.
They are so dishonest they have to go that far.”

In many cases like this, there is not one ounce of truth in the attacks on Beck.
The tactic is also known as propaganda
—and it’s just another tool in the Left’s smear arsenal.



---



Ex-CBS anchor Dan Rather considers Beck “controversial,” but says he “loves” Keith Olbermann of MSNBC.

Speaking of MSNBC —
not content on merely calling him a “racist,”
the network cut right to the chase and called on Fox News to fire Beck.
Following his comments that Obama has deep-seated problems with white people,
MSNBC’s “First Look” said
that it was “amazing” that what Beck said “isn’t a fireable or even a suspendable offense.”

Arianna Huffington, the namesake of President Obama’s suggested reading for the American people, the Huffington Post, says she
“resents spending even a second of my life thinking about him.
But part of me recognizes that [Beck]’s too dangerous to ignore.”
She goes on to accuse him of inciting violence and anger
and argued that while the government cannot hold him legally liable,
he should be held “morally liable” and subsequently fired from Fox News.

The New Yorker calls Beck “energetically hateful, truth-twisting,” and blasts the “negative, regressive take on politics” he expresses with “raw-throated outrage, smiley sarcasm and, occasionally, a display of hurt, even tears.”

Newsweek went so far as to prominently feature Beck in an article titled,
“HATE: Antigovernment Extremists Are on the Rise —and on the March.”
Pictures in the article link Beck and former Alaska Gov.
Sarah Palin to 1930s socialists with a caption that reads:
“Huey Long castigated the rich
and Father Coughlin denounced Jews in the 1930s.
Today, the microphones belong to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.”




A week before Beck’s latest best-seller, a novel titled “The Overton Window,” was even released, the Left was already working to discredit the book and its author.
Media Matters derided the fictional work as sheer “lunacy” and once again labeled Beck a conspiracy theorist.
The Huffington Post critiqued a short video trailer promoting the book, which featured stanzas written by British poet Rudyard Kipling, stating,
“The trailer for Glenn Beck’s new book is just as nuts as you’d expect.”

Baseless charges like these are hurled at the conservative talker on a daily basis from the mainstream media —
a liberal salute to Alinsky’s Rule 8: Keeping the pressure on your opponents.
“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

When the media’s feigned outrage over Beck’s opinion does not hinder the growth of his audience, they turn to the next slanderous charge.
When Fortune ran a cover feature on Beck’s unique ability to turn his political and comedic commentary into cold, hard cash,
the media accused him of being a money-grubbing showman.

When Beck warned viewers about Black Liberation Theology and the Left’s ideas of “social justice,” newspapers such as the Washington Post reserved copy space for a rebuttal.
The radical progressive Rev. Jim Wallis, Obama’s own “spiritual adviser,”
urged Christians to “stand up to Glenn Beck” and accused him of “picking a fight.”
Time echoed Wallis with an article asking, “Why Does Glenn Beck Hate Jesus?”

It’s not uncommon to go through a week with a different Glenn Beck hit piece splashed across the pages of all the country’s major newspapers, magazines and left-wing cable channels.
Simply put, the media are reacting to a threat to their agenda —
and their agenda is Barack Obama.

As a result, the mainstream media have joined the liberal blogosphere and organizations like Media Matters
and the Center for American Progress in an organized effort to attack Beck with amazing coordination from coast to coast.
With a close look at various media outlets’ coverage,
it seems clear they all use the same set of recycled Glenn Beck talking points
and all regurgitate the same distortions and outright lies.

MODERN-DAY GOVERNMENT BLACKLISTING

In addition to Wallis, others close to President Obama have played a role at various levels of the Left’s smear machine.
The White House began waging war with Fox News last spring,
accusing the cable network of spreading false information
about the president’s health care plan and pedaling propaganda from the Republican Party.
Ironically, then-communications director Anita Dunn said
the White House would not just sit back and defend itself
because the conservative media “will say anything.
They will take any small thing and distort it.”

Most recently, the Left’s attack machine has moved to a new level, incorporating the power of the federal government.
Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., is accusing Beck
of misleading his viewers in an attempt to profit off Americans’ economic jitters.
Weiner is accusing Beck of maintaining an “unholy alliance” with Goldline, one of Beck’s television and radio sponsors,
and suggests that Beck talks about America’s dangerous levels of debt only to try and scare people into purchasing gold.
Lost on Weiner, apparently, are the fact
that Beck himself is a customer of the gold dealer
and the fact that America’s debt is indeed at a dangerous level.


“Goldline rips off customers, uses misleading and possibly illegal sales tactics and deliberately manipulates public fears,”
Weiner claims, yet the company maintains an “A+” rating from the Better Business Bureau.
Typical of government bullies, Weiner promises a future congressional investigation into Beck’s business relationship with Goldline.

Finally, when all else fails, the Left brings in the big guns.
President Obama himself has singled out Beck’s programs,
calling Beck and Rush Limbaugh “troublesome” and telling Americans to get their news somewhere else.

During a recent commencement address at the University of Michigan, Obama told the audience,
“If you’re a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh,
try reading a few columns on the Huffington Post website.”
But even with the power and prowess of the president behind the Left’s smear of Glenn Beck,
it’s doubtful Beck fans will happily hop over to a website
that promotes a “Twitter protest” against Beck
or features headlines such as “Lewis Black: ‘Glenn Beck Has Nazi Tourette’s’”;
or stories about how Glenn Beck hates Mother’s Day;
or riveting video of HLN’s Joy Behar telling Beck, “I don’t give a flying f**k about you.”

SOLDIERING ON

To a regular viewer and listener of Beck’s programs,
the accusations thrown at him from the Left’s smear campaign machine are ludicrous, untrue and sometimes even comedic.
Suggesting Glenn Beck “hates Jesus” or leads an “axis of the obsessed and deranged”
serves only to unite Beck’s loyal bloc of viewers against the Left.

Though he does from time to time
use over-the-top imagery and sarcasm on his shows that may be lost on many people,
it’s not this behavior that causes the Left to froth at the mouth and howl with outrage.
Perhaps most offensive to the far-Left is
that Glenn Beck refuses to succumb to the rules of political correctness
and doesn’t try to soften the blow of the harsh realities the country faces today.
The American people appreciate honesty, and Beck dishes out his own daily dose.

Above it all, Beck has sparked a movement toward enlightenment in America —
both political and historical
—and this movement represents a significant threat to the Obama agenda and, subsequently, the media.
He has
reignited the public’s interest in our nation’s founding principles,
exposes left-wing policies and individuals that make up the Obama administration
and serves as the common man’s advocate against their disastrous economic policies.

For a self-educated, self-described “rodeo clown,” Glenn Beck must be doing something right.
For the time being, Beck is a pivotal public figure in the fight against the agenda of President Obama and his liberal progressive cohorts.
And as long as he’s able to withstand the onslaught of attacks from the Left,
Beck will remain a de facto leader of the movement
working to take our country back.

“Beck has sparked a movement toward enlightenment in America —
both political and historical
— and this movement represents a significant threat
to the Obama agenda and, subsequently, the media.”

Meredith Jessup is assistant editor for Townhall.com and a contributing editor for Townhall Magazine.

[BlueMoose]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxo8V_6h-Mc

[BlueMoose]

http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/comp/cw11greekcatholicschismp1kh.htm

[BlueMoose]

http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/comp/cw11greekcatholicschismp1kh.htm

[BlueMoose]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYLq8BQ8mDM&feature=channel

[BlueMoose]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2542340/posts

[llandres]

“Do you think that Beck’s recent criticism of J.D. Hayworth is an effort to curry favor with the Left?”

No, not at all (IMO) - he just wants to let us know of something worth seeing and considering in our heretofore staunch support of Hayworth. It’s still a given that McCain needs to be booted out, but I (and several others I’ve talked with) was very disappointed to see this side of Hayworth. He’s since issued a statement about it, however. There’s another candidate that’s a teaparty conservative, but he most likely won’t have a chance. All things considered, Hayworth on the issues (Borders being #1) beats McCain hands down if it boils down to just the two of them, and it probably will.

[llandres]

“Working from an office in his two-bedroom apartment in Madison, Wis., ...
In his pajamas, no doubt...............”

Or as Glenn would say “in his underpants” - LOL

[Captain Beyond]

Besides Rush Beck is the only one punching the progressives in the eye everyday and factually pointing out they are the nemesis of liberty and freedom. Beck is catching flak because he is right on the target by exposing the truth of the progressive agenda.

[llandres]

“How does helping John McCain square with Beck’s stated conservatism?”

But that’s the thing - Glenn has always put telling the facts ahead of politics. Plus, he’s said many times what he thinks of McCain. As I said in an earlier post, JD promptly issued a statement about that infomercial (made years ago). In light of Juan McCain’s numerous disastrous philosophies and voting record, there’s no way that that one judgment lapse alone will be a deal-breaker. My concern has always been that, even if JD were 100% flawless, the McCains have SO much money, power and connections to keep him in office. ‘Course, so far this has been the year of the underdog - let’s hope that continues to be the case.

[llandres]

You know, yes - the Patriot Act issue is the one thing that I also disagree with Glenn about. As you said, he’s never been specific about what he doesn’t like about it and I do wish he would go into that one day. But you may have hit it on the head, that he’s fallen for the Left’s argument that it infringes on citizens’ rights. I agree with all you said on that. No, they’re not listening in to our conversations with grandma and yes, it’s done a lot to help track terrorists and is a necessary tool in our ever-dwindling (thanks to Obama) arsenal of intelligence.

[llandres]

GB is re-run nightly at 1 am central, 2 am eastern. BUT you can see his show online daily anytime after 8 pm central at glennbeckclips.com. Great, because it’s broken into 4 or 5 youtube clips, no commercials. But you have to check it the same day, because I believe you can no longer watch past shows on the site.

[llandres]

“he will suddenly add, “And the Republicans are no better.”

I think he means the Party, which has been, and continues to be, guilty of selling out if you look at some of the candidates they’ve endorsed in these primaries, Charlie Crist being one.

[Yosemitest]

"Besides Rush
Beck is the only one punching the progressives in the eye everyday and factually pointing out they are the nemesis of liberty and freedom.
Beck is catching flak
because he is right on the target by exposing the truth of the progressive agenda."

Very well said, (with a little formating).
I couldn't agree with you more if I tried.
But ... with this "J.D. Hayworth vs. McCain" issue,

I wish Glenn Beck would REMIND people of this, the McCain/Soros connection:




---



The Dream Ticket
(McCain and Soros: The Most Dangerous Man in America, Bankrolled By the Most Evil Man in the World)
by Srdja Trifkovic
“While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,”
Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America,
“an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it is so very difficult to remain entirely true to oneself or to advance without self-abasement.”

Some 170 years and 36 presidents later, the choice presented to the American people at this year’s presidential election does not merely confirm the correctness of the Frenchman’s assessment;

it amplifies his verdict in an absurd, almost surreal manner.

Among America’s presidents

—many of them impressive and some great, especially in the early years—
there have been a few warmongers, neurotics, ignoramuses, and dullards. No single chief executive has been marked by all of those traits, however.

Jackson was famously feisty and a true American hero. Polk waged a war of aggression, but at least that war could not be lost, and it increased the power of the country. Tyler, Fillmore, Buchanan, and Pierce have been maligned ex post facto after 1865 by the winners. Andrew Johnson, Grant, and Harding were personally flawed, rather than systemically destructive. Theodore Roosevelt was a trigger-happy imperialist, yet he was also intelligent, rational, and understood the uses and limits of American power in a multipolar world. George W. Bush has no such understanding, of course, but to his credit, he advocated a “humbler” foreign policy in 2000. His subsequent transmutation was mainly because of his malleability coupled with his delusional belief in divine guidance, rather than a preexistent pernicious design.

John McCain is the most dangerous man in today’s America because this likely next occupant of the White House combines a muddled world outlook with an imbalanced personality, limited intelligence, and low character. Like Vladimir Ilich Lenin or Ted Kaczynski, he needs dehumanized adversaries and loves to hate, never mind the ideology. He pours scorn on powerful countries such as Russia or China, or weak ones such as Serbia, not because it makes any sense from the point of view of this country’s security interests, but because they resist—or may resist—what his archneoconservative advisor Robert Kagan terms America’s Benevolent Global Hegemony. He screams at his subordinates, red in the face and foaming at the mouth, and calls them names. He graduated 894th of 899 from the Naval Academy in Annapolis and famously lost five jets over Vietnam before finally being taken prisoner. He has taken money from his party’s declared enemies while simultaneously seeking that same party’s presidential nomination.

In brief, it is unsurprising that John McCain has attracted the attention of, and found a benefactor in, one of the most evil men in the world, George Soros.

As our readers may recall (“George Soros, Postmodern Villain,” Views, February 2004), there is hardly a bad cause that the Philanthropist From Hell does not sponsor. From open borders and one-world government to gun control and Kosovo’s independence, Soros is there, in person or through his Open Society Institute and a myriad of fellow-traveling outfits. In his “American” guise (he has a few others), he supports the Democratic Party because he sees it as the primary vehicle for the promotion of his agenda. Being an astute speculator, he is not limiting his options. In McCain he has discovered a nominal Republican who is willing to pursue key points of that agenda, to get the GOP to accept them as its mainstream position, and—potentially—to impose them on the country as official U.S. policy.

The point of contact was campaign-finance reform, and the channel of support was the Reform Institute, founded in 2001 and headed by the Arizona senator until 2005, when he resigned in order to prepare for another presidential bid. The RI was initially funded by Soros’s Open Society Institute and by Teresa Heinz-Kerry’s Tides Foundation. They were excited by the McCain-Feingold bill because it had the capacity to limit private groups’ ability to challenge the institutionalized leftist bias of the mainstream electronic media with “issue ads”

—such as those Swift Boat ads that inflicted so much damage on John Kerry in his subsequent presidential bid.

The rapport between McCain and Soros was cemented during the 2000 presidential campaign. On July 30, McCain delivered the keynote speech at Arianna Huffington’s “Shadow Convention” in Philadelphia, an event bankrolled by Soros. That ultraliberal political forum was set up as a counterevent to the Republican National Convention, which was held in the same city two days later. Senator McCain was the only person to speak at both events. It was like a pretender for the presidency of the John Randolph Club giving the keynote speech to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in the same city, two days before the JRC’s annual meeting.

When the Reform Institute opened shop under McCain’s chairmanship in July 2001, Mrs. Huffington

—a close associate and confidante of Soros—
was on its advisory committee. The Institute was a pseudo-think tank designed to keep McCain’s staff assembled and gainfully employed in anticipation of another presidential bid. Its offices were in the same building in Alexandria as his election committee, his PAC, and the lobbying firm of his 2000 campaign manager, Rick Davis. The Institute hired three other key campaign staffers:
legal counsel Trevor Potter as legal counsel,
finance director Carla Eudy as finance director,
and press secretary Crystal Benton as . . . communications director.

The Constitutions and Legal Policy Program of Soros’s Open Society Institute donated “above $50,000” to the RI while McCain was at its helm. In addition, the OSI distributed $300,000 in grants to different groups that defended McCain-Feingold from threatened legal challenges during its passage through Congress in 2002.

Last April, McCain tried to distance himself from his benefactor, with his old/new campaign manager Davis describing Soros as a “liberal mega-donor” who wants to “buy this election.” The performance was as convincing as George H.W. Bush decrying the influence of “those Washington insiders.” What matters is that McCain has not given back any money to Soros. He has not returned the $200,000 that the Reform Institute received in donations from Cablevision in 2002 and 2003 either, when McCain was on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. It was undoubtedly coincidental that, in a letter to the FCC written at that time, McCain supported Cablevision’s proposal for the introduction of a more profitable cable pricing scheme.

The Reform Institute has promoted another important pillar of Soros’s agenda:

open and unlimited Third World immigration.
According to an Investor’s Business Daily editorial (September 27, 2007), vast pro-illegal immigration rallies across the country in 2006 were anything but a spontaneous uprising of hundreds of thousands of angry Mexicans. Soros’s OSI had money-muscle there, too, through its $17-million Justice Fund, which included involvement in the immigration rallies and funding of illegal-immigrant activist groups for subsequent court cases:
“So what looked like a wildfire grassroots movement really was a manipulation from OSI’s glassy Manhattan offices. The public had no way of knowing until the release of OSI’s 2006 annual report.”

This is not to say that McCain’s support of illegal immigration correlates exclusively with the money he is getting from Soros. By all accounts he is an “honest” amnesty enthusiast. His man in charge of immigration reform at the RI was, until two years ago, one Juan Fernandez, who holds dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship and is a former member of Vicente Fox’s cabinet in charge of Mexicans abroad. This man believes that anyone of Mexican ancestry, even after going through the motions of becoming an American citizen (as he has done), remains a Mexican forever and should “think Mexican first.” Such a one should never contemplate—let alone accept—assimilation as an option. Dr. Fernandez now serves as John McCain’s Hispanic Outreach Director and is seen as a potential Cabinet-level appointee in a McCain administration.

McCain’s additional overlap with Soros is in Eastern Europe. The Arizona senator broke ranks with his party in March 1999 and voted for Clinton’s war against Serbia, which Soros enthusiastically supported directly and through generous donations to the International Crisis Group. The war was illegal, since the House refused to authorize it under the War Powers Act, but McCain was its enthusiastic advocate then and remains a supporter of Kosovo’s self-proclaimed independence now.

When it comes to other disputed regions, McCain is firmly in the sovereignist camp

—provided that it is anti-Russian.
Any post-Soviet frozen conflict area’s nominal title-holder
—Moldova vis-à-vis Transdnistria, or Georgia under the Sorosite Mikheil Saakashvili vis-à-vis Abkhazia or South Ossetia—
is in the right, he asserts, and should be supported by the United States in reasserting sovereignty over the rebel provinces, regardless of the wishes of the inhabitants. He condemned a large poster in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali hailing Putin as “our President”:
“I do not believe that Vladimir Putin is now, or ever should be, the president of sovereign Georgian soil.”

No such scruples apply to sovereign Russian soil, however. In December 1999, McCain accused the Clinton administration of turning a blind eye to Russian “crimes” in Chechnya, attacking Russia’s “brutal to the extreme” military campaign and announcing that if he were president, he would move to cut off IMF loans to Moscow.

“McCain was the first senior American politician to say that what the Russians are doing is genocide,”
cooed the Washingtonian Russophobe in Chief Zbigniew Brzezinski.
“It was a gutsy call, and he called it just right.”
In the same “gutsy” vein, McCain boasted earlier this year of staring into Putin’s eyes and seeing the letters KGB. The difference from 1999 is that, today, Russia is better poised to offer much needed loans to America than the other way round.

China fares hardly better. In 1999, the country’s leaders were, in McCain’s view, “ruthless defenders” of an “inhumane regime.” A decade and a couple trillion dollars in trade deficits later, he is still committed to “keeping pressure” on China “to improve its human rights record.”

Elsewhere around the world, mere readiness to talk is a sign of inexcusable weakness to McCain. Last May, he accused Barack Obama of

“inexperience and reckless judgment”
for saying that, if elected, he would be willing to talk with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions during his first year as president. According to McCain, such talks would only embolden
“an implacable foe of the United States.”

He is equally critical of Obama’s readiness to talk to Raúl Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
A man that would be seen in a normal country as a dangerous charlatan—at best a dilettante in need of tutoring—has made it so far because the bedlam known as the U.S. foreign-policy community approves of “engagement” abroad and wide-open doors at home. The “community’s” impulse is neurotic; its justification, gnostic. It reflects the collective loss of nerve, faith, and identity of a diseased society, producing a self-destructive malaise that is literally unprecedented in history. The intoxication is the arrogant belief, in general, that our reason and our science and our technology can resolve all the dilemmas and challenges of our existence and, in particular, that enlightened abstractions—democracy, human rights, free markets—can be spread across the world and are capable of transforming it into one big Wal-Mart. Both the madness and the intoxication have a “left,” Sorosite narrative, and a “right,” McCainite one.

McCain’s global outlook is virtually identical to that of George Soros. He supports NATO’s further expansion into Russia’s backyard, not because it would enhance American security but because it would bring us a step closer to a neoliberal globalized world. Addressing the Hoover Institution last year, he called for a

“global League of Democracies—one that would have NATO members at its core—dedicated to the defense and advancement of global democratic principles,”
and he repeated the call in May in his “vision for 2013.”

McCain could have copied his one-world idea word for word from the mission statement of the Democracy Coalition Project (www.demcoalition.org), a Soros-funded NGO led by two former Clinton White House officials. More remarkably still, there is little if any difference between McCain’s “League of Democracies” and the “Concert of Democracies” suggested by Obama’s advisors. The League/Concert would be Washington’s standing mechanism to circumvent the U.N. Security Council, which throughout the Cold War was the closest approximation of the 19th-century “Concert of Powers” that helped avoid a major European war from Napoleon to 1914.

The identity of the two mind-sets became obvious when Obama’s advisor Ivo Daalder and McCain’s advisor Robert Kagan coauthored an article in the Washington Post supporting the concept. As a former long-serving GOP Senate staffer who knows McCain warns, those who expect that the post-Bush era will mean a return to some kind of normalcy from the current neoconservative fever are sadly mistaken:

“Think of the League/Concert as a permanent Iraq ‘Coalition of the Willing’ on steroids. The conscious goal of such a mechanism would include institutionalized hostility to Russia and China.”
Come 2013, Iraq really might seem to have been a cakewalk.

A former top Clinton official, Strobe Talbott, praised both McCain and Obama as “moderate pragmatists” in foreign affairs, This is “good news,” according to Dr. Talbott—the man who believes that the United States may not last until the end of this century because the very concept of nationhood will have been rendered obsolete, and all states will recognize a single, global authority. The ideological foundation for George Soros’s global vision is the same:

Nations are social arrangements, artificial, temporary, and dangerous.
In John McCain, they both recognize a man who can be manipulated by themselves, or people like themselves, in the service of global goals and political objectives that are contrary to American interests and detrimental to peace in the world.

In 1999, the Economist wrote that the United States bestrides the globe like a colossus:

“It dominates business, commerce and communications; its economy is the world’s most successful, its military might second to none.”
Less than a decade later, the U.S. economy is structurally weak, and its once-powerful manufacturing base moribund. The financial system is on the verge of collapse, no longer sustainable by dwindling infusions of foreign cash and ever-rising domestic borrowing. Eight years of George W. Bush have taken us further away from the Republic of yore and into a postmodern empire devoid of cohesiveness at home or a credible narrative abroad. Iraq is a disaster that indicates the limits of American power as clearly as the rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the demise of the dollar. The military is still second to none, yet barely able to deal with the insurgency in two small faraway lands.

This country’s problems are huge, but they are not insoluble. It is as possible and necessary to control the borders at home and to spend no more than is earned as it is possible and necessary to disengage from foreign entanglements that do not contribute to the well-being and security of the United States. It is possible and necessary to establish a realistic balance between ends and means in American foreign and security policy on the basis of the Golden Rule.

John McCain does not understand this because he is obtuse. He will refuse to consider its merits because he is deluded and bellicose. He will not accept any responsibility for the consequences of that refusal because he is morally challenged. Like Napoleon III in 1870, Franz Josef in 1914, or Leonid Brzehnev in 1979, he will try to prop up an ailing empire with reckless diplomatic gambles and military adventures. The results will be similar, or worse.

May God help us all.

Srdja Trifkovic is Chronicles’ foreign-affairs editor.

This article first appeared in the July 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. New subscribers can call (800) 877-5459 for 12 hard-hitting issues.



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You know, I really shouldn't do that. (post a thread within a thread)
But with McCain,

you still get ... the "VILE Left."

[Old Teufel Hunden]

Thanks for the info!

[reaganaut]

In his pajamas, no doubt...............”

Or as Glenn would say “in his underpants” - LOL

- - - - - -
Yep, the super secret special holy ones with masonic markings that are supposed to protect him.

No I am not kidding, I can provide links to pictures and documentation.

[Deb]

Not exactly accurate, besides, someone like Beck who claims to be such a student of government would be expected to know that the party always supports the incumbent candidate.

Reagan knew it which is why he always sucked up whatever misgivings he might have had and campaigned for the Republican incumbent. He was smart enough to understand that nothing can be done without winning the majority. After that you can battle over policy.

Like Palin's support of McCain, Reagan campaigned tirelessly for Gerald Ford, someone the RINO screamers would have gone ballistic over.

[llandres]

“Yep, the super secret special holy ones with masonic markings that are supposed to protect him.

No I am not kidding, I can provide links to pictures and documentation.”

Can you elaborate? Sorry I’m in the dark on that.

[reaganaut]

They don’t like us posting the pics here, but here are some links to pictures, history, info and ‘faith promoting stories’ about protection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_garment

http://www.i4m.com/think/temples/mormon-garments.htm

http://mormoncurtain.com/topic_garments_section1.html

http://www.ldsendowment.org/clothing.html

http://www.salamandersociety.com/temple/funnyundies/

http://mrm.org/underwear