SOROS AND ANTI-SEMITISM….I don’t pay much attention to conservative reaction to fiery liberal speeches anymore. As Avedon Carol put it last week after Al Gore’s speech:
The right side of the Blogosphere was pretty much in lock-step with the RNC talking points: He’s lost it. He was anti-American and full of rage. He was frothing-at-the-mouth. He was crazy. And (this is getting so original) he has officially lost it. He has careened off the rails. In other words, they had nothing to say.
That’s the basic reaction to any liberal who expresses any passion these days, so why bother? It’s obviously just manufactured outrage and doesn’t really deserve to be taken seriously.
Still, the reaction to George Soros’ recent speech stands out for sheer repugnance. Max has the details on how blatantly conservatives twisted Soros’ words to pretend he said things he plainly didn’t, and Media Matters has the story on Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley’s odious bloviating on Sean Hannity’s show:
Look, if he wasn’t a multi-billionaire, he’d just be another ignored left-wing crank….This is a man who has blamed the Jews for anti-Semitism….This is a man who, when he was plundering the world’s currencies, in England in ’92, he caused the Southeast Asian financial crisis in ’97….He said that he has no moral responsibility for the consequences of his financial actions. He is a self-admitted atheist, he was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust.
Translation: he’s a Jew-hating Jew, he’s a greedy Jew, he’s a conniving and heartless Jew, he’s an atheistic Jew, and he’s a Jew who must have been (if you get my drift, wink wink) a Nazi collaborator. Anyone who’s not a child knows perfectly well what Blankley was saying here.
Conservatives routinely jump on every alleged piece of anti-Semitism out of France as proof of European moral decrepitude, and here at home they can get seriously bent out of shape by nothing more than liberals using Jewish names as examples of neocons (i.e., Kristol, Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz). But Blankley’s transparently racist imagery hasn’t caused much of a ripple. Eugene Volokh has an extremely mild rebuke, but that’s about it. Nada from Instapundit, Sullivan, The Corner, Den Beste, or LGF, despite the fact that anti-Semitism is part of their regular beat.
Maybe they’re just waiting until next week. We’ll see.
