Navigating the web

The Soros Web and the Spiders Within

By Ed Lasky

Barack Obama's latest straw-man style of attack is focused on the United States Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has earned his ire by being a free-enterprise group, and one that is practicing its First Amendment rights to criticize an administration bereft of officials with real-world experience but chockablock with animus toward capitalism. Obama's latest claim is that the ads run by the Chamber are funded by foreign sources.

Who is helping perpetuating this claim -- for which there is no evidence? George Soros: Obama's pal and donor, and a man who wielded his power over his 527 groups to help power Obama to the Oval Office.

The New York Times charts the path of the "foreign money" charge:

The issue of the chamber's funding first gained notice this week when ThinkProgress, a blog affiliated with the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal advocacy group, posted a lengthy piece with the headline "Exclusive: Foreign-Funded ‘U.S.' Chamber of Commerce Running Partisan Attack Ads."

The piece detailed the chamber's overseas memberships, but it provided no evidence that the money generated overseas had been used in United States campaigns. Still, liberal groups like MoveOn.org pounced on the allegations, resulting in protests at the chamber's offices, a demand for a federal investigation by Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, and ultimately the remarks by Mr. Obama himself.

White House officials acknowledged Friday that they had no specific evidence to indicate that the chamber had used money from foreign entities to finance political attack ads.

Soros is pulling the strings of his puppets -- again.

Think Progress is a branch of the Center for American Progress, the think-tank founded and funded to a great extent by George Soros and his political allies, Herb and Marion Sandler. The Center has been described by Bloomberg News as the "Soros-Funded Democratic Idea Factory." The CAP also provided the administration with many of its officials, including the controversial Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones (he returned to his sinecure at the CAP when he was "resigned" in the wake of revelations about his radicalism). The head of the CAP, John Podesta, managed the transition from Senator Obama to President Obama. The Obama administration has plenty of alums from the Center for American Progress.

The next step in the proliferation of the man-made virus was to get MoveOn.org to spread the canard that the Chamber was using foreign money to fund political campaigns in America. MoveOn.org is the jewel in the crown of Soros-funded 527 groups (Soros is the single largest funder of such groups). The fact that Soros runs an offshore hedge fund that keeps its investors hidden (and most probably includes a slew of foreigners) is rarely mentioned. The riches of Soros include hefty management fees extracted from foreign investors; money is fungible. Can we logically consider that some of the money Soros liberally spreads in American politics is foreign money?

Then Senator Al Franken used his pulpit from the Senate (where he usually slumbers or mugs insulting facial expressions when Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell speaks) to get media coverage to hype the charge regarding foreign money. Al Franken was the beneficiary of George Soros when he ran his campaign against the incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman. Franken owes a great deal to Soros, who was the donor to a range of 527 groups based in Minnesota which ginned up false and specious charges against Coleman -- a story that I covered in "The Soros Connection in the Minnesota Senate Race Vote Count."

Soros wanted Coleman -- probably the sharpest monitor and critic of the United Nations -- out of the Senate. Coleman was focused like a laser beam when exposing fraud (especially the Oil for Food Scandal) and other problems at the United Nations (see "Why Soros Wants Norm Coleman Out of the Senate"). Soros was a donor to Franken, and he also helped cover the expenses of the legal campaign waged by Franken to take the seat by, among other steps, hosting a big fundraising party at his fancy digs in Manhattan.

The election of Franken was fraught with problems but nevertheless was made official by Minnesota's Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie. Ritchie was elected with the help of theSecretary of States Project -- an undertaking of a group called the Democracy Alliance. This is a group of billionaires led by George Soros and Democratic activists and operatives (including Anna Burger, a highly placed official of the Service Employees International Union) that has undertaken to change the political landscape of America and is using a bulldozer to do so. The agenda of the Secretary of States Project was to place into office politicians whom they consider friendly towards their goals -- among them electing Democrats. These Secretaries are responsible for ensuring the integrity and honesty of the voting process in states.

And what have we discovered since Franken's election was made official by the Secretary of State of Minnesota? A citizens' group has run its own investigation regarding the integrity of his election and, lo and behold, has discovered enough fraudulent votes cast for Franken that suggest his election, in retrospect, was at the very least worthy of further investigation .

Then, to cap it off, President Obama ranted and raved about the Chamber and the influence of foreign money in American politics. George Soros and Barack Obama have a long history together. Soros was an early and ardent supporter of Senator Barack Obama -- even finding a loophole in campaign finance laws that allowed him and Soros family members to escape the limits that normally apply in terms of donor giving. They flooded Obama with money, a topic I covered in an article I wrote for American Thinker back in early 2007 ("Soros, Obama and the Millionaires Exception").

The canard being promoted by Obama and George Soros has no basis in fact, as the New York Times makes clear:

Organizations from both ends of the political spectrum, from liberal ones like the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Sierra Club to conservative groups like the National Rifle Association, have international affiliations and get money from foreign entities while at the same time pushing political causes in the United States.

Such groups, which collectively have spent hundreds of millions dollars on political causes to advance their agenda, are required by law to ensure that any foreign money they receive is isolated and not used to finance political activities, which would violate a longstanding federal ban. The Chamber of Commerce says it has a vigorous process for ensuring that does not happen, and no evidence has emerged to suggest that is untrue.

Even the White House was eventually forced to own up to the rhetorical ruse:

White House officials acknowledged Friday that they had no specific evidence to indicate that the chamber had used money from foreign entities to finance political attack ads.

"The president was not suggesting any illegality," Bob Bauer, the White House counsel, said. Instead, he said Mr. Obama's reference to the chamber was meant to draw attention to the inadequacies of campaign disclosure laws in allowing groups to spend large amounts of money on politics without disclosing their donors.

Of course, their admission happened at the end of Friday -- always the dumping ground for embarrassing admissions -- timed to a news cycle that all but takes weekends off.

The strategy was clear: gin up a canard so it enters the spin cycle (spun by Soros-linked enterprises) during the week in a very active political season. The hope was to generate enthusiasm with the Democratic base to pony up some campaign money and desire to cast votes. Mud was slung onto the Chamber by using a baseless charge. Then -- when the truth came out -- an admission that there was no backing for the charge, no evidence, was made during the dead zone of the news cycle. This is how a virus spreads. How to stop the virus? Vote the right way in November.

The entire campaign is dishonest in the extreme. Michael Barone calls it "projection" because Obama's own 2008 campaign all but invited foreign donations:

... it's well documented that the 2008 Obama campaign did not put in place address verification software that would have routinely prevented most foreign donations. In effect they were encouraging donations by foreign nationals. Here's the Washington Post on this back in October 2008:

"Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor's identity, campaign officials confirmed. Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged." (snip)

Then there's the question of whether foreign nationals are contributing to the Obama campaign. There is more than enough evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Federal Election Commission, including the $32,332.19 that appears to have come from two brothers living in a Hamas-controlled Palestinian refugee camp in Rafah, GA (that's Gaza, not Georgia). The brothers' cash is part of a flood of illegal foreign contributions accepted by the Obama campaign.

A Chamber spokesman alluded to this bit of history by suggesting those in glass houses should not throw stones. Regardless of the blatant dishonesty of the Big Lie regarding Chamber spending, the latest news from Mike Allen's Playbook on Politico is that Barack Obama and his supporters will continue to spread the Big Lie and "double down on it." Arrogance and impunity in action.

How is that hope and change mantra that lulled so many Americans to suspend their disbelief coming along? The strategy may be clear and despicable, but the network behind it remains murky to the general public. So much for Obama's transparency pledge and the politics of hope and change.