Interesting piece on George Soros sent to me. An excerpt:
That he is anti-Bush is unremarkable, but Soros’ statement last December that the defeat of the President is “a matter of life and death” was silly. His largesse to Bush’s foes-although substantial-does not reflect the stated urgency of the moment: $15 million for America Coming Together; $3 million for John Podesta’s new think tank; and $2.5 million for MoveOn.org falls far short of a month’s cost of running his many foundations around the world.
I have to read it over again, do not agree with everything the author says, but he raises some good points.
Drudge links to this piece which quotes Soros as drawing a moral parallel between Abu Ghraib and Sept. 11. That’s a false and offensive comparison, of course, but it’s also so far removed from reality that it’s difficult to know what to say. Does Soros really believe that?
He said it, Brit Hume ran it. Evita introduced him.
And all that was missing from Dean was YEARGH!
Boy do I wish I had money.
Good article, Thanks for the link Andy. I didn’t know Soros was that bad.
Years ago, one of my friends, an observant Jew, had heard that she would need to “hide” her identity if she applied for a grant (she is interested in middle European music, etc.); this was when Soros was active in Central European education. She said she had had it with that kind of thinking (she saw her Jewishness as a positive thing, she was enjoying asserting her Jewish identity and studying her culture). She didn’t apply. Freudian analysis usually doesn’t reach the depths, but some of Soros’ screeds do make him appear to be cut off from who he is – or he is Gatsby, trying to define himself in some tumbleweed way. We’ve been down that path before; I thought we might learn something from the last century. And one of the lessons is not to trust people who are not at ease in their own skin.
Something bothers me about this agenda. We may want abortions to be legal, we may be in favor of gay marriage, we may recognize that sometimes euthansia is, indeed, better than the alternative. Nonetheless, someone who finds these major issues disturbs me. Perhaps I’m getting old. Perhaps it is because I have three daughters who soon will be making choices of their own about bearing children. Perhaps. . . Finally, I feel that these are choices a man makes who not only doesn’t feel the life force but is pulled by its opposite.
I can’t get over the sense that if I had billions to spend, I’d spend it trying to make abortions and euthansia less necessary. While I’d encourage gay marriage, I’d spend my money trying to make sure that children had sound and secure homes in which to grow. I know, I don’t have his money and all of us make our choices. Many of mine aren’t altruistic.
But there is malaria to control, AIDS to battle with both policies and medicines, there are villages that need clean water and immunizations. There are the Borlaugs of the world to finance rather than the Lani Guiners. There is slavery to stop in the Sudan and cancer to conquer here.
Of course, we are all different. And, indeed, I do give money to the Bush campaign and could be more generous with the little I have. Of course he looks at the world differently than I do. But when there is so much to be done to lessen human suffering, how could these be up there in the most important of causes?
Does anyone think his focus would have been different if he had made his money by actually building something – farming, building cars, constructing highways to connect villages? (Perhaps, indeed, those at Halliburton would look at the world differently than he?) I won’t buy the Marxist vision any farther than that – I do think actually seeing the product of our labors used and enjoyed by someone else is as fulfilling a part of capitalism as putting those buyers’ checks in our accounts.