PERETZ, SOROS, AND SCAIFE. OK, OK, I know the standards are supposed to be lower for Marty Peretz, but the dishonesty of his smear of George Soros in this week's TNR is just too much. In attacking Soros for making an off-hand and probably tongue-in-cheek reference to America's need to de-Nazify post-Bush, Peretz rhetorically demands that we "Imagine the outcry if a Republican moneybags -- say, Richard Mellon Scaife -- had declared that Hillary Clinton is a communist." Funny he should choose that example! I seem to remember that, in fact, Scaife called journalist Karen Rothmyer, a "f-cking Communist c-nt" for no apparent reason when she tried to interview him for the Columbia Journalism Review [full disclosure: I worked with Rothmyer]. Typing both their names into Google confirmed this recollection. The minor point here is that Peretz is lazy. If he had taken two seconds to investigate whether a version of his hypothetical had actually occurred, he would have discovered it had, and not used it. The larger point is that Peretz seems to think, with no evidence to support him, that poor Richard Mellon Scaife comes in for comparative abuse in the press for his political activity, in contrast to nasty George Soros, who gets a free pass. This is utter nonesense. If I had a penny for every time FOX News or a radio shouting head complained about George Soros during the 2004 election, or tarred my employer (the Center for American Progress) as "Soros-funded," I'd be rich enough to buy TNR and get Marty's rants out of its otherwise enjoyable pages. Media Matters has kept good records on this. Meanwhile, Scaife holds opinions far outside the mainstream, is nasty and abusive personally, has funded an entire right-wing intellectual infrastructure to disable healthy policy debate by doing fake policy work, and his media organs unfairly smear political opponents. But the left does not have hackish outlets like FOX to vilify him, so Scaife is far less well-known than Soros. As a Jew who shares Peretz's distaste for people foolishly equating, even in jest, every bad government with Nazi Germany, I wish Peretz would show some restraint and intellectual rigor in making that argument, so that it might actually appeal to, rather than totally alienate, liberals who hate Bush but understand the difference between him and Adolf Hitler.
--Ben Adler
