PrintOctober 29, 2010
Soros and the Collapse of the Left
Now let me get this straight: George Soros, Media Matters, and the White House, in some unclear capacity, have unveiled their master plan to destroy the right: isolate and nullify Fox News by getting people fired from NPR.
NPR pink-slipped Juan Williams for the equivalent of stating that when he sees it's raining out, he gets his umbrella. NPR president Vivian Schiller, evidently divining that disparaging fears of Muslim terrorists wouldn't play well in a country that has suffered three serious terrorist attempts in a little over a year, added that this was merely the latest of a series of Williams outrages, but she produced no examples. (Schiller now says that she "regrets" how the firing was handled.)
Obviously, there has to be another reason, and when we look around, we find none other than the Prog Twins, Soros and Obama. (Not to forget David Brock...or is that the stupidest statement I ever typed?) Obama has been having bad dreams about Fox, so Soros contributes a cool $1.8 million to NPR for the purpose of hiring one hundred investigative reporters to learn the truth about Bigfoot. Another $1 mil went to Brock's Media Matters for the purpose, I imagine, of mixing more mud to fling -- they don't do anything else. Then, as soon as the checks cleared, Williams finds himself out on the street.
This is not a coincidence, comrades. This is the Alinsky isolate-and-destroy method in textbook form. A kindergarten textbook, granted -- the idea appears to be to prevent any further liberal contact with Fox, limiting the network to unbalanced right-wing voices, and then to sit back and wait for an aroused public to march on the Fox offices with pitchforks and torches. Of course it would happen just that way -- nobody would ever listen to Beck, Hannity, or Palin if NPR didn't encourage them.
The success of this plan can be gauged by the fact that everybody but Muslim Brotherhood front groups have condemned NPR; Williams has accepted a $2-million contract with Fox, where, as the last of the level-headed liberals, he's likely to feel much more at home; and Soros has found himself under far more public scrutiny than he's used to.
This is one of those schemes that couldn't possibly work even if successful. No matter what the direct outcome, Fox would still be a monster network and NPR a nostalgia chain for an ever-shrinking band of true believers. As it is, we have Williams and Fox attaining close to saintly status while Soros looks like a cranky, half-crazy old Hungarian (granted, he looked like that before, too), and Obama...well, he looks like Obama.
I'm sure some people are whispering that there's a lot more to it, that some deep plan has been put into play about which we'll know nothing until it's too late, that Soros was emptying Fort Knox and Obama was driving trucks full of ballots out of Chicago's cemeteries while everybody was watching Williams burst his chains like Houdini. I do not believe this.
We have seen Obama and crew in operation for two years now, and it is low comedy. We now know why Christopher Buckley supported him -- so he'd have plenty of material. For exhibit A, I present ObamaCare, which, with an overwhelming majority in both House and Senate and the support of the media and the medical trade groups, the administration was unable to pass without infuriating the entire country, demolishing Medicare, delaying the recovery, and unleashing the Tea Parties. I rest my case.
As for Soros, while working on the upcoming Death by Liberalism, I came across a project that he sponsored along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation called the Project on Death in America. It was supposedly intended to familiarize Americans with death, since no one in this country has ever heard of it or knows anything about it. (This little conceit is quite popular on the left -- see Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death.) In actuality, Soros targeted two perfectly legitimate medical innovations, palliative care and hospice care, in order to ram through his vision of legal euthanasia. He put tens of millions into the effort, recruited medical personnel across the country, and nicely tarnished the entire field of end-of-life care, all with next to no attention from our alert media.
And then, after the better part of a decade, with no warning, he dropped it. The entire program. Cut off all funding, left his hired medical types high and dry, hid most of the documentation, and instead involved himself in attempting to chase George W. Bush out of office. After several weeks of research, I was left with this: "A lot of questions remain about this program..." Namely, what the hell Soros thought he was doing.
I'm aware that Soros is the great bête noire of conservatism. An unstoppable, sinister force involved in everything and active on infinite levels of chicanery. But if that's the case, if Soros is the real-life version of a Bond villain, then why is the left in such desperate straits? Why are they on the verge of being cast out of the political universe? Why is Soros himself publicly admitting that he "can do nothing against the Republican avalanche"?
It's my contention that Soros is yet another example of that common leftist phenomenon, the rich dilettante who shows up with buckets of money and a plan, throws no end of funds at every crank initiative from legalizing pot to building a mosque atop Mt. Rushmore, and at last departs into private life much poorer and in no way wiser. The only difference with Soros is that he has a lot more money that will take much longer to burn through.
Obama, of course, speaks for himself. Here we are emerging robust and healthy from the second Great Depression, with historically low unemployment, no foreclosure problem, terrorism ended, Iran tamed, the entire world running on wind power, and all the wealth spread around a bit. Did I miss anything? Oh, yeah, those oceans haven't begun dropping yet. But he'll be able to get that now, at least if Fox doesn't get in the way.
So here we are mere days before the Apocalypse, when the floor of the Capitol opens up to swallow the last howling Democrat -- and what's the grand plan of this pair of masterminds? Getting Juan Williams fired.
But now Soros has control of that mighty weapon of public opinion, NPR? Let's look more closely at that. A very conservative friend of mine had an older and rather ambiguous brother who would show up, turn on the radio, tune in NPR, and then walk around smirking at everybody and chuckling loudly every time an announcer said "Karl Rove." That was his method, evidently, of striking a blow for liberation from the Bush tyranny. And that is all that NPR amounts to. That is what NPR is for, with its cute Garrison Keillor Hallmark Card homilies and shows with half-clever titles like "All Things Considered." It is "Doonesbury" for the ears, a network for people who are not well-educated, not well-read, not very radical, and not very courageous, but who would like to think of themselves as all those things. In other words, NPR is a lapel button, a ritual gesture along the lines of wearing a rising doughnut t-shirt or driving a Prius.
If Soros thinks he can do something with that crowd, he's welcome to it. Putting NPR up against Fox is like sending Hello Kitty out to stalk the Predator. My recommendation would be to defund the sucker, let Soros take over, and allow him to spend his last years discovering exactly what a financial black hole the network actually is. More than likely he'll simply dump it the same as everything else as soon as his next brainstorm hits.
The whole story, to my mind, is yet another sign, along with the midterms, fleeing czars, and collapsing programs, of the bankruptcy of the left. Keep in mind that a decadent, deteriorating system doesn't simply flop over into terminal sloth. There's no lack of energy and initiative, but it's all of the wrong kind. Resources and time are wasted on weird little projects that accomplish nothing and wouldn't help even if successful, while the real problems grow larger, fiercer, and closer to intractable.
That's what's happening here. The left has been in the driver's seat for four years. The record is clear. Not a single one of their programs has taken off. Their congressional vanguard, including such grandees as Boxer and Feingold, is in deep trouble. They haven't been able to raise a finger against the Tea tsunami. But they got Juan Williams fired! That's one for the progs! I predict a lot more of this kind of thing. Mara Liasson, another NPR figure guilty of torturing innocents in the Fox dungeons, has been targeted by Media Matters. Over at Wired, there were a lot of calls last weekend for the termination of military writer Noah Schachtman for the thought crime of pointing out that the Wikileak Iraq documents contain a lot of material verifying the WMD narrative. They've reached the point where they're eating their own. This could work out very nicely.
The left may well be reaching the end of its string. It's happened before, and somebody -- usually a Republican -- has always been around with a shot of Dr. Goodtime's zap juice to enable it to stagger around for another decade or so. But this round may be different. For the first time, we have a public both aware and aroused. Political questions are out in the open. There's no telling what will happen when the whole things shakes out. But I have a feeling the changes may be deeper and more thoroughgoing than anyone now expects.
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker and will edit the forthcoming Military Thinker.
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker and will edit the forthcoming Military Thinker.
