PUBLIC NUISANCES
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
JLETT T vitriol an earlier president endured from tyrants for defending freedom despite heavy costs, I was reminded that the brutes often sound the same. The case they make against American...
...JLETT T vitriol an earlier president endured from tyrants for defending freedom despite heavy costs, I was reminded that the brutes often sound the same...
...Scaife's money has at times gone to politicians, but the bulk of it has gone to intellectuals engaged in the battle of ideas, a battle that the left does not like to wage in an open forum—if at all...
...Beating the President, Soros told the Washington Post, is "a matter of life and death...
...The Norman Lears and Haim Sabans who splurge money on left-wing causes have been around for years, causing no alarums over the fate of American democratic process for the Clinton left...
...I feared for my country," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton writes upon beholding political opposition—some of it for criminal behavior—in her melodramatic memoir...
...America under Bush," he says, "is a danger to the world...
...Richard Mellon Soros and the groups he is funding are about the only political participants in American history to boast of their anger, and they certainly are the only haters who have been honored by polite liberal opinion for their coarseness...
...A closer look, however, at the nature of these two philanthropists' expenditures sheds light on why the right is winning and the left is losing...
...Are these groups that debate issues, develop scholarly ideas, turn out learned monographs and journals...
...Domestic critics hoping to win favor and perhaps even the presidency might note the futility of the 1960s prophets and the political dead-end of the 1930s isolationists...
...Rich philanthropists funding the right's ideas are shocking...
...The left tried it on Scaife and failed...
...Rich philanthropists funding the left's enthusiasms are public-spirited...
...Well, no, they are hard-edged political activist groups uninterested in new ideas...
...The Clintons, Mr...
...Now along comes the Clintons' idea of a proper political philanthropist, their Richard Mellon Soros, and he is absolutely bellowing, spending more in a year than Scaife might spend over a decade...
...Yet the presence of a rich man supporting the right raised the left's fears of conspiracy, Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy...
...The Ford Foundation was not sufficient to satisfy their political needs, nor the Rockefeller Foundation, nor the MacArthur mother lode...
...Now the focal point of these left liberals' anger is our suave president, George W. Bush...
...McAuliffe of the Democratic National Committee, and all the other crybabies who whimpered and wrung their hands about the fate of American democracy when they found rich conservatives were funding conservative think tanks and intellectual reviews now have a rich political philanthropist of their own...
...The right is deeply involved in ideas and developing new ideas for modern economies, education and defense, for instance, supply-side, vouchers, and preemptive strike...
...The left has given up on ideas and is engaged solely in politics, for instance the politics of personal destruction...
...The case they make against American vigilance usuallybalances on a nonsense...
...I never heard Richard Mellon Scaife make such a bizarre comment...
...The double standard with which the media and the left have treated Richard Mellon Scaife and Richard Mellon Soros brightly illuminates the double standard with which the right and the left are treated...
...Soros seems to advocate a rope-a-dope strategic defense for America...
...Now it will try it on President Bush and my guess is it will fail...
...Let the terrorists hit us until they exhaust themselves...
...This hysteria is a little disconcerting...
...They needed a billionaire, and in the person of George Soros they have him...
...Bush has a "supremacist ideology...
...Socially, economically, and in foreign policy, America's present course is sound...
...All that motivates the left is anger...
...Here is but another example of the left's double standard...
...They are directing their anger at American conservatives, whom they call "extremists," though since the successful administration of President Ronald Reagan the ideas of these "extremists" have for the most part governed America...
...Rich ion Soros WASHINGTON So THE LEFT-WING DEMOCRATS have found their Cosimo de Medici...
...Is this the desperation of an old political order facing oblivion...
...The man that particularly worried her and her colleagues (and whom they victimized for exercising his First Amendment rights) was Richard Mellon Scaife, who over a lifetime has spent millions, along with many other public-spirited conservatives, to establish such think tanks as Heritage, Hudson, and the American Enterprise Institute to develop and advance ideas scorned by the bigots of American academe...
...He is spending $15 million on operations such as MoveOn.org and America Coming Together...
...I assume that last utterance is a reference to the President's promise to strike terrorists first, before they ambush another 3,000 civilians in American skyscrapers...
...Says Richard Mellon Soros, Bush is "the central focus of my life...
...In fact, the American left has not had a new idea in years...
...At least they have found one who lives outside of Hollywood...
...Then we shall have peace...
...DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...
Vol. 36 • December 2003 • No. 7
