Sympathy for George Soros

Reading Rick Hertzberg this week, I realized that Glenn Beck has achieved the impossible: He has made me feel sorry for George Soros. Rick does a fine job of summarizing Beck's lunatic attack on the unlikeable billionaire currency speculator. The dog-whistling anti-Semitism (first noticed by Michelle Goldberg -- not a relative, except in the M.O.T. sense) is atrocious, of course, but an even more pernicious aspect of Beck's attack on Soros came when he suggested that Soros's support for the anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe was actually a bad thing, rather than his finest moment:

Early in the first of his three hours, (Beck) set forth his theme, illustrating his alchemical talent for turning facts into lies:

Soros has helped fund the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia. He also helped engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. So, what is his target now? Us. America.

Relying on his audience's naïveté, Beck never mentions that all these uniformly peaceful "revolutions" were against Communist or post-Communist dictatorships.

This is bad craziness.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/sympathy-for-george-soros/66606/