I posted Jon Stewart's hilarious take on this last week (I strongly urge you to watch both videos), but as laughably crazy as Glenn Beck can be, his slanders of George Soros are really pretty frightening, too.
For a serious look at the same Glenn Beck show, check out Hendrik Hertzberg's commentary in the New Yorker. Here's an excerpt:
Call us oversensitive, but when our efforts are shanghaied like a nineteenth-century sailor and forced to work as a deckhand aboard a ship of lies, we can’t help getting our hackles up. You don’t have to be a professional semiotician to see that the Glenn Beck promo is intended to leave the impression that George Soros, the hedge-fund investor and funder of anti-totalitarian and liberal causes, is an anti-Semite; that he was somehow complicit in the Holocaust; and that he is an enemy of Israel. These are lies—lies told by innuendo, but lies all the same. The promo’s shard of truth is that “The World According to Soros” was indeed published in The New Yorker. Its author was Connie Bruck. (“Bruc” is a Fox flub, not a Fox fib.) The quotes from it, though accurately transcribed, are made to function as lies by being placed in an utterly mendacious context. Bruck’s article is the “source” of these smears only in the sense that the brooks of the Catskills are the “source” of New York City’s sewage.
George Soros, born in Budapest in 1930, spent his boyhood hiding in plain sight from the Nazis and their local nationalist-Fascist surrogates. He survived, despite some frighteningly close calls, because his father disguised the family’s Jewishness with forged documents and fake identities. As a teen-ager, Soros witnessed the early years of Communist dictatorship. He immigrated alone to England, studied at the London School of Economics, and discovered that he had a feel for financial markets. In 1956, he took a job on Wall Street. (In New York, he was joined by his parents, who had become refugees after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution.) He made himself wealthy; he currently ranks as No. 35 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world. Soros made and makes his billions in the amoral world of stock and currency speculation; he gives them away in a quite different spirit, but with the same eye for leverage. He provided crucial support to civil-society movements throughout the Soviet bloc. He probably did more than any other private citizen in the West to nudge European Communism into history’s dustbin. While his pro-democracy initiatives continue (Burma is a current area of focus), he has lately added a large domestic component, including funding for liberal policy institutes and advocacy groups. And he spent millions in support of the Presidential candidacies of John Kerry and Barack Obama.
Apart from the forged documents and fake identities (and, of course, the support for Democrats), viewers of Fox News learned none of this from Beck.
I recommend that you read the whole thing (it's only a single page). This was a vicious, ugly attack - based entirely on lies - by Glenn Beck and the rest of Fox "News." Every time I think these people have reached the absolute bottom, they sink lower still. Where will it stop?
The really bizarre thing is that Soros' efforts to promote democracy and capitalism in Eastern Europe - in opposition to Communist dictatorships - is presented as an evil attempt to control the world, with America his next "target." What, is the right-wing defending Communism now? Of course, none of this is explained to Fox viewers.
Relying on his audience’s naïveté, Beck never mentions that all these uniformly peaceful “revolutions” were against Communist or post-Communist dictatorships. (As for the coups in the Balkans, there have been none to engineer.) The falsehoods quickly spin out into pathology; the next day, Beck is accusing Soros of plotting a Weimar-like inflation—“$11.43 for an ear of corn! One ear!”—in order to “reap obscene profits” and “bring America to her knees.” But enough. Too much of this can be hazardous to your health.
Sadly, not a tiny fraction of the people who avidly watch Fox will ever read this New Yorker column - or anything else that will dent their faith in lunatics like Beck. Fox is far and away the most popular cable "news network," making bucket-loads of money for these people.
And money talks, doesn't it? I fear for my country.
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