Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [80]
Not only do the Jews disagree with Christian teaching . . . but they seek to interfere with it. It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious attack that they preach and practice. The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and other Christian festivals, and their opposition to certain patriotic songs, shows the venom and directness of that attack.59
“Lord of the Democrats”
Bill O’Reilly wasn’t the only one to vilify George Soros. When NewsMax’ s Richard Poe published his Soros conspiracy article in 2004, Republicans immediately realized the political potential of hanging a rich, secular Hungarian Jew with unconventional drug policy ideas around the neck of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Poe’s article came out on May 1, 2004. One month later, the Republican National Committee circulated an internal memo that described Soros’s radical positions, calling him “Lord of the Democrats” and the “Daddy War-bucks” of drug legalization. The memo urged Republican politicians to use floor speeches and other opportunities to pillory Soros.
Republican politicians enthusiastically obliged, rushing to dig up whatever dirt they could find on this new threat to America. What they found were the penetrating investigations of Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review. Appearing on Hannity & Colmes, Newt Gingrich claimed that Soros only attacked Bush because he wanted to legalize heroin.60 And Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert insinuated to an incredulous Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday that Soros got his money from drug operations:
HASTERT: You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where—if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from. And I—
WALLACE (interrupting): Excuse me?
HASTERT: Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years—George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there. I don’t know where George Soros gets his money.
WALLACE: You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?
HASTERT: I’m saying I don’t know where groups—could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know. The fact is we don’t know where this money comes from.61
Following the lead of O’Reilly and the Republican leadership, right-wing commentators joined the fun with their own LaRouche-Engdahl-derived Soros smears. Echoing Engdahl’s “Jews who are not Jews” line, Tony Blankley, editor of the conservative Washington Times, said to Sean Hannity, apropos of nothing, “This is a man who has blamed the Jews for anti-Semitism.”62 And Ann Coulter later said to Hannity’s side-kick, Alan Colmes, apropos of nothing, “George Soros, who’s always going around prattling about the perfidy of the Jews . . . says the reason for anti-Semitism is the Jews.”63 This self-hating Jew attack was the perfect vehicle for highlighting Soros’s Judaism without crossing into explicit anti-Semitism. Blankley and Coulter got to mention that Soros was a Jew while pretending to be standing up for the real Jews whom Soros allegedly hated so much.
Incidentally, both Blankley and Coulter also echoed Endgahl’s Nazicollaborator slur. On Hannity’s show, Blankley subtly pointed out that Soros “was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust.” When an inquiring listener emailed Blankly to ask for a clarification, he spelled out the subtext: “Soros and his family converted from their Jewish faith and survived the Holocaust (there was speculation that they may have collaborated with the Nazi’s [sic]).”64 And in a later appearance on Hannity, Ann Coulter called Soros “an admitted Nazi collaborator.”65
The Republicans were so pleased by the success of their Soros bashing during the 2004 election that they followed up again the next year. When House majority leader Tom DeLay