O’Reilly Lies About Soros?
Conservatives have been driven crazy by the face that George Soros has been providing financial support to the Democratic Party. Some hope to discredit John Kerry through attacks on Soros, especially Soros’ atheism. Unfortunately, some of those attacks have been very dishonest.
Media Matters quotes O’Reilly: Listen to this -- what he said about his own father. This is George Soros about his own father. In a 1995 interview with The New Yorker magazine, Soros said he was disappointed that his terminally ill father wouldn't die quickly enough. "Unfortunately, my father wanted to live," Soros said. "I was kind of disappointed in him. I wrote him off."
Media Matters also quotes from the original interview:
[W]hile Soros' philanthropy has led some people to view him as an altruist or a Robin Hood (characterizations that he says are off the mark), he seems to feel that his father was more the genuine article: someone who was truly nonmaterialistic, charging those who could pay for his services -- he was a lawyer -- and working free for those who could not; who was outgoing and focussed [sic] on others; who derived his greatest pleasure from helping people directly (and, in fact, saved many lives during the Nazi occupation).
Now, however, Soros told his audience [during a speech at Columbia University's College of Physicians & Surgeons in late November 1994] that his father, terminally ill, had agreed to an operation, "but he didn't want to live after the operation if his personal integrity was invaded. And, unfortunately, that's what happened. But then he wanted to live."
Speaking haltingly, Soros said, "I was kind of disappointed in him. I wrote him off." A few weeks later, he added, his father died, "I was there when he died, yet I let him die alone. I saw him, but didn't touch him. The next day, I went to the office, but I didn't tell people he had died. I was, in a way, denying his dying."
There is quite a difference between what O’Reilly said and the reality of what was written. O’Reilly surely had the original article to work from, but that can only mean that he engaged in deliberate distortion. Did I say distortion? Looks more like a lie, to be quite honest. Somehow, I suspect that if O’Reilly had anything substantive to say about Soros, he would have done so already.
