According to the seers and soothsayers of the
right, a terrible new
threat confronts America and its inspired leader
George W. Bush. Like
Shakespeare’s Calpurnia, they warn their mighty
Caesar of lionesses
whelping in the streets, strange omens and portents
in the night sky,
and they do fear them. The Wall Street Journal
editorial page has waxed
apoplectic; James K. Glassman of the American
Enterprise Institute
forsees "a great threat not just to the re-election
of George Bush, but
to our truly open society." Even the Washington
Post has expressed
alarm. And what’s the cause of all this hubbub?
Simple: the Democrats
have found a Scrooge McDuck of their own. International
financier
George Soros, among the richest men in the world,
plans to devote a small
fraction of his estimated $7 billion to defeating
President Bush. The
Hungarian-born tycoon, who emigrated from England
to the U.S. in 1956,
has pledged a reported $18 million to three liberal
organizations: $5
million to internet advocacy group MoveOn. org,
$3 million to former
Clinton aide John Podesta’s Center for American
Progress, and another
$10 million toward a Democratic voter registration
drive.
Sounds ominous, right? By taking advantage of
an obscure constitutional
loophole permitting even billionaires to oppose
Bush, Soros bids to
overturn the natural order. As if that weren’t
enough, he’s taken to
writing books and articles and granting interviews
explaining why he
believes that Bush’s re-election would have terrible
consequences for
America and the world.
Writers in the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington
Times have expressed
consternation that a foreign-born citizen would
be so cheeky. A website
called GOPUSA.com has described the Jewish financier
as a "descendant
of Shylock." The Postasks Democrats to compare
the consequences of
"conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife
opening his bank account
on behalf of Mr. Bush."
It’s worth wondering what’s in Washington Post
water coolers these days.
The reclusive Mr. Scaife, who unlike Soros inherited
his pile, has bankrolled
right-wing causes for decades. Had editors read
their own newspaper’s fine
reporting back in 1999, they might realize that
without Scaife’s largesse, we
might not have such ornaments to democracy as
the Federalist Society, the
American Enterprise Institute, News-Max.com or
the American Spectator magazine.
Scaife’s funding of the Spectator’s secretive,
$2.6 million "Arkansas Project"
during the Clinton years contributed to the care
and feeding of Whitewater
witness David Hale, a convicted felon making
absurd allegations against the
president. It also financed articles describing
the president of the United States
as a drug smuggler and murderer. Operatives hired
by the Spectator even
probed the private lives of journalists deemed
unfriendly to Kenneth Starr.
Unlike Clinton’s sexual antics, Starr placed
his office’s investigation of the
"Arkansas Project" under seal. Grand Jury secrets,
you see.
The estimable Mr. Soros, in contrast, works in
broad daylight. He even
writes his own books. His latest, entitled "The
Bubble of American
Supremacy" argues that the Bush administration
has responded to the 9/11
terror attacks exactly as Osama bin Laden wanted
it to: by implementing
"a radical foreign policy agenda" in which might
makes right. An excerpt
appeared in the December 2003 Atlantic Monthly.
"The Bush doctrine,"
Soros wrote "... is built on two pillars: the
United States will do everything
in its power to maintain its unquestioned military
supremacy; and the United
States arrogates the right to pre-emptive action.
In effect, the doctrine
establishes two classes of sovereignty: the sovereignty
of the United States,
which takes precedence over international treaties
and obligations; and the
sovereignty of all other states, which is subject
to the will of the United States.
This is reminiscent of George Orwell’s ‘ Animal
Farm’: all animals are equal,
but some animals are more equal than others."
The Bush doctrine, Soros recently told Josh Marshall,
"is unacceptable
cannot possibly be accepted—by the rest of the
world." By invading Iraq
under false pretenses, he thinks, the U.S. rid
the world of a despicable
tyrant at the expense of its fundamental credibility.
When President
Bush uses farcically Orwellian doublespeak like
"weapons of mass
destruction-related program activities" to describe
Saddam’s
non-existent military threat, he doesn’t even
expect to be believed by
any but the dullest voters. And when Bush boasts,
as he did in his State
of the Union speech, that "no one can now doubt
the word of America,"
and that he "will never seek a permission slip
to defend the security of
our country," he doesn’t mean that Iraq’s imaginary
links to 9/11 have
been proven. He means that any nation he threatens
had better back down.
Having lived under Nazi and communist occupation,
Soros insists that
people who call Bush a "fascist" are both wrong
and counter-productive.
He also insists, however, that an ideology of
pure power is profoundly
un-American and doomed to fail. How that makes
the man a danger to
democracy, I cannot imagine.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award.