Soros now goes down in the lexicon of true Bush haters. He confuses having money, with having wisdom. I wonder what he would say differently if he worked for Al Queada?
He proves the Democrats were totally disingenuous in regard to McCain Feingold, they had no intention of allowing wealthy contributors limits to how they would manipulate elections with money. Soros has said he will spend his entire fortune in order to defeat George Bush. I would look forward to seeing him broke, but I doubt he has the integrity to have actually meant it.
Soros: Bush's War on Terrorism Worse Than 9/11 Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com Friday, June 4, 2004
WASHINGTON – After a rousing introduction by Sen. Hillary Clinton, multibillionaire George Soros wasted little time in excoriating President Bush in a speech Thursday. Bush’s war on terrorism has turned Americans “from victims to perpetrator,” he said to loud applause from the “Take Back America” audience, organized by the leftist group Campaign for America’s Future.
In his soft-spoken, lightly accented voice, the Hungarian-born Soros, who made his fortune trading in and manipulating the world’s markets, described how in his opinion “the war on terrorism as conducted by Bush has since caused more innocent victims than the victims of the [9/11] attack on America.”
At one point, he compared the “Bush Doctrine” with fascism and communism. “The common ground between fascists and communists is that they both want to impose their point of view on the world.” Soros said the Bush Doctrine was similarly aimed at imposing a point of view on the world.
Soros argued to the capacity crowd in the Wardman Park Marriott’s grand ballroom that under the doctrine he saw “two kinds of sovereignty in the world: U.S. sovereignty, which is inviolate, and the lesser brand suffered by the rest of the world that is subject to the Bush Doctrine.”
“It’s really quite an atrocious proposition,” Soros said, pointing to the importance of the presidential election in November. “This is not a normal election; it’s a referendum on the Bush administration, the Bush Doctrine and the doctrine’s first application, the invasion of Iraq.”
Imposing the Soros Doctrine
“I had been expending my energies in other parts of the world,” Soros explained in his halting voice. “After Iraq I saw the need to stand up and become engaged in the election process in this country.
“Bush ran for office as a compassionate conservative, advocating a humble foreign policy. Then came 9/11, and then came the Bush Doctrine.”
Soros explained his belief that the watershed moment the Bush administration went from “boom to bust” was after the disclosures of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
“We must show [the world] that America doesn’t stand for these policies. It’s the most important issue I’m involved in,” he said.
Soros’ Reverse Darwinism
Soros told the attentive audience how he feared the new emerging brand of “American supremacists,” grounded in misguided notions of “social Darwinism,” adhering to a primitive principle of “survival of the fittest” rather than a spirit of cooperation.
In what amounted to his version of a crescendo of rhetorical passion, the mild-mannered speaker raised his voice only slightly to challenge the audience: “We can’t impose our will on the world!
“We went to war in Iraq on false pretences. There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. There were no weapons of mass destruction…
“And what I find most galling is the final argument of justification that we went for the sake of the Iraqi people.”
Soros added, “I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life helping people use democracy. If there is one thing I know, it’s that using military power to bring democracy can’t work.
“Well, I’ve put my money where my mouth is,” Soros continued with a rare hint of animation, adding that now is the time to strike – now that the Bush administration, in economic terms, has “gone from boom to bust.”
Now that the false bloom is off the administration, Soros argued, Americans can concede that a defining moment of truth has arrived. “Americans now recognize that they’ve been deceived and we’ve embarked on a policy that cannot succeed.”
The philanthropist said that the days where the administration could decry all criticism as unpatriotic were over. Gone too are the days when if you “were against the Patriot Act, Ashcroft could say you were giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
Soros harkened to his own experiences in Bosnia, where civil war followed free elections, to suggest that the same phenomenon was looming in the cards for Iraq after the turnover of sovereignty and its own free elections.
The financier, who has heretofore concentrated on former Soviet-bloc countries, suggested that the U.S. involvement in Iraq had become a disaster and that one of the primary reasons was that its conquering army “was not trained for occupation duties.”
He said that ironically a policy that based itself on flexing military muscles had devolved into a new reality, “a reduction of military might.”
‘Change of Regime’
“I’m convinced there will be a change of regime,” Soros said with faint enthusiasm. “The public realizes it has been misled …we will reject the Bush Doctrine.”
As he promised to describe an alternative to the way the president had managed the war on terrorism, the audience leaned forward, only to hear vague generalities about “recognizing the need to work together to improve the arrangements for security” and “devising ways to intervene with failed states or rogue states.”
Soros described how as a boy in Hungary his father saved his family’s lives by obtaining false identities to trick the National Socialists. After the war, with Hungary occupied by the Soviets, Soros left for the London School of Economics, where he learned his trade of outsmarting the markets.
Since making a fortune, Soros described how he looked around to find something to do with his money and elected to pursue a singular philanthropy in 1979 “fostering open societies in South Africa.” There followed similar work in his native Hungary and countries that broke out of the former Soviet Union.
Campaign for America’s Future was founded by Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey in 1996 and advertises that it “is a center for progressive strategy and works hard to forge a new American majority for progressive reform through issue advocacy, communications and coalition building.”
The conference, which began on Wednesday, concludes Friday evening.
Sen. Clinton’s only involvement was in introducing Soros, whom she described as another person in the growing legions of “people who have said, ‘I can’t stand idly by anymore.’ He has been willing to use his resources to help us get organized.”
As she has in the past, Clinton, D-N.Y., warned the audience that if Bush remained in office four more years, “he will leave our country unrecognizable.”
Touting the recent elections in India, home of hundreds of millions of adults, she said the populous democracy counted the votes without a hitch, something that should be a guide and model to the U.S. come November.
An advocate of paper trails combined with touch-screen voting, Clinton admonished, “We have to make sure the votes are counted.”
Outside the ballroom were stalls selling posters with a Bush likeness and the label: “Dumb, Decadent and Disconnected.” Hundreds of campaign buttons touted: “Re-defeat Bush!”
Clinton came and left to a thunderous standing ovation, outdoing the relatively mild outpouring for Soros. Neither speaker allowed for questions.
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