Michelle Dubert | Democrats' rotten sugar daddy

There's a call in every election to extract the money from politics. Soft money contributions have been curbed, but it's hard to stop a billionaire from donating his personal fortune to a cause. Bill Gates uses his money to help underprivileged children. And George Soros uses his money to buoy impaired Democrats.

Here's the rundown: Soros, 76, is an investor and speculator who made waves when he showered Democrats with money before the 2004 election.

His $8.5 billion net worth ranks him No. 27 on Forbes' list of the richest Americans. In the lead-up to the election, Soros donated $3 million to the liberal Center for American Progress, $5 million to the MoveOn.org political action committee and $10 million to Americans Coming Together, or ACT, the folks who brought Bruce Springsteen and R.E.M. to swing states to rally voters against George W. Bush. Soros' contributions were legal because they went to organizations supporting candidates and not the candidates themselves.

These actions alone might be excessive, but they're not contemptuous. In elections, Soros supported American groups with American ideals. It's not right to hate somebody because he's filthy, nauseatingly rich, though it's tempting. Soros has claimed that his reason for backing Democratic causes was his dissatisfaction with President Bush's conduct on the war on terror, and he recently released a book on this idea. But aside from his election politics, Soros' bulging bank account is supporting borderline anti-American plights.

Notwithstanding his pointed criticism of Israel and his contempt for Zionists, Soros seems to have taken a turn for terrorists.

Soros had been relatively quiet since he squandered all that dough on his loser pet proposition - the 2004 election - but his name resurfaced in the interesting if bizarre case of Lynne Stewart, the defense attorney indicted for defending the "Blind Sheikh," Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who led Islamic Group, an Egyptian terrorist organization.

Rahman was sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center attacks and his purported role in a failed attempt to destroy the United Nations headquarters and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels. Because of ensuing threats to the United States from his cohorts, Rahman was prohibited from communicating with anyone except his wife and attorneys, who were in turn prohibited from passing information to his associates. Stewart, one of his lawyers, did so anyway. She was sentenced this month to 28 months in prison for her violation, which she intends to appeal. Through his Open Society Institute, Soros contributed $20,000 to Stewart's defense fund in 2002, when she was originally on trial for aiding terrorists.

"At the time, the Open Society Institute believed there were Constitutional issues of the right to counsel at stake, including the electronic surveillance of privileged attorney-client conversations," said OSI and Soros spokeswoman Amy Weil in an e-mail.

Before these disclosures were brought to light, Soros was more a partisan than a radical. Now he seems to toe the line.

Soros' defense of Stewart is more than just a slap in the face to the Bush administration or a sly smirk to the Justice Department. Defending a woman who aided terrorists aiming to kill Americans is, well, indefensible. Apparently his solution to Bush's execution of the war is to dissolve it altogether. That'll do wonders to shake the "cut and run" tag Republicans glued to the Democrats' platform.

Democrats need to decide if this is really the sugar daddy they want for their party; judging by how they've embraced him over the last three years, they don't seem to mind much. But Soros' attempts to buy elections through extremist organs should raise more concerns than it has among the public. What's more, Soros' means of propagandizing should be denounced by his party, which clamors at the partisan stranglehold Republicans have kept on Washington. So far neither has happened, nor likely to in the next two weeks. Considering his lightning-rod status and the nature of the causes he endorses, the left is in no better position to win with him than without him.

His money would probably be better spent setting up the Soros Foundation for Impoverished Politicians.

Michelle Dubert is a College senior from Closter, N.J. Her e-mail address is dubert@dailypennsylvanian.com. Department of Strategery appears on Thursdays.

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