Soros Responds to Beck

George Soros responds to Glenn Beck's depiction of him as a "puppet-master" trying to bring down the US government on Fareed Zakaria's GPS talk show on CNN. Soros maintains that Beck is expressing the opinion of Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and accuses both Beck and Fox News of employing George Orwell's "newspeak" in using falsehoods to mislead their audience.

Non-partisan fact-check website Politifact.com supports Soros' claim rating roughly half of Beck's public statements either "false" or "pants on fire."

The appeal of Beck and Fox News to the right has drawn comment from George Packer in his New Yorker blog Interesting Times.

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck have far more power in the Republican Party (it sometimes seems to include veto power) than (Naomi) Klein, (Spike) Lee, and (Michael) Moore have in the Democratic Party. The views of right-wing commentators in the grip of the paranoid style (Obama is a stealth radical, the Democrats are imposing socialism) are much closer to mainstream conservative and Republican belief than the views of their counterparts on the left (the levees in New Orleans were blown up by the government, the White House had something to do with 9/11) are to mainstream liberal and Democratic belief.

The reasons are complex, but I would list these: the evangelical and occasionally messianic fervor that animates a part of the Republican base; the atmosphere of siege and the self-identification of conservatives as insurgents even when they monopolized political power; the influence of ideology over movement conservatives, and their deep hostility to compromise; the fact that modern conservatism has been a movement, which modern liberalism has not.

--Ballard Burgher