By Kevin Foley
George Soros, the billionaire financier who supports liberal causes, is a frequent target of Fox News' Glenn Beck.
Recently on his Fox television program, Beck featured a puppet show in which he helped his audience understand how Soros allegedly pulls the strings of the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in congress through the Tides Foundation, the Service Employees International Union and the NAACP.
I don't know what was sillier, the use of puppets to bludgeon viewers with the metaphor or Beck's unhinged and unfounded assault on Soros.
The puppet part I get. Many of Beck's viewers undoubtedly require visual aids in order to understand what the right-wing talk show host is talking about. The attack on a powerful moneyman is more puzzling.
Soros was curiously quiet until Tuesday when he finally lit into not only Beck, but Fox News and the Tea Party, telling International Crisis Center dinner attendees that America could be "on the verge of some dictatorial democracy," according to Robert Lezner's Streettalk post at Forbes.com.
Evidently, Soros needed no puppets to reinforce his points during a conversation with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, maybe because his audience was a tad more sophisticated than Beck's.
Lezner reports that Bill Clinton, Oxford University chancellor Lord Christopher Patten, and hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones were on hand along with financiers, mutual fund managers and former diplomats Thomas Pickering and John Whitehead.
Soros castigated Fox News for giving Beck a forum, one from which Fox advertisers have been fleeing in droves since Beck called President Obama a "racist." Of late and with zero evidence, Beck has identified Soros on his TV and radio programs as the head of a vast left-wing conspiracy seeking nothing less than a takeover of the United States with the goal of a "flagless, nationless planet," whatever that means.
Beck's attacks on Soros have been carefully monitored by MediaMatters for America, which has proven that the deranged talker has distorted or falsified the financiers' background and past statements and writings in order to support his wild theories. After MediaMatters disclosed that News Corp. had given $1 million to GOP governors and Soros countered with a million of his own to MediaMatters, Beck immediately tied the liberal watch dog group to Soros' alleged conspiracy.
Beck may have finally jumped the Soros shark. Unlike his own viewers, those in attendance at the ICC dinner are people who control or influence the movement of vast amounts of investment capital, the kind usually spent on securities issued by companies like, say, News Corp. And clearly what George Soros has to say about one of News Corp's marquee properties is of interest to those moving all that capital around.
So while Beck was putting on his puppet show, Soros was deciding when and where he would counter attack and he couldn't have picked a better place and time. Proof came yesterday when Beck launched into a hysterical 20-minute condemnation of the Forbes post before demanding an apology.
Rupert Murdoch's a busy man so he likely isn't fully aware of everything Beck says and does and he probably doesn't really care anyway. But it's safe to assume when a fellow billionaire speaks to other fellow billionaires, The Alien listens.
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |