Soros to Fund Media Effort Against McCain

George Soros just doesn't know when to quit. After wasting millions of his personal fortune to go after George Bush in 2004 and various other Republicans since, he will now be funding Media Matters efforts to smear John McCain:

Wealthy Democrats are preparing a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Senator John McCain. And it will be led by David Brock, the former investigative reporter who first gained fame in the 1990s as a right-wing, anti-Clinton journalist.

The planned campaign is the product of a shakeup in the top ranks of the struggling independent Democratic groups. Brock, now best known as the ex-conservative founder of the liberal group Media Matters, last month quietly assumed the chairmanship of what's expected to be the main vehicle for independent Democratic attacks on McCain, now called Progressive Media USA.

The move comes after the groups that had been expected to spearhead attacks on McCain – the Fund for America and Progressive Media USA's previous incarnation, the Campaign to Defend America – failed to raise the money needed to dent McCain's armor.

"We're a little behind where we need to be," he said.

But after a dinner Tuesday night at the Manhattan apartment of liberal megadonor George Soros, at which Brock and the consultant Paul Begala laid out the group's plans, Brock said his group now has commitments worth $7.5 million – almost twice what the Fund for America is expected to report raising in the first quarter of this year. He said the group would begin running ads before it meets its $40 million
goal.

Brock suggested that the group could do the work of a press corps that, he says, has "fallen down on the job" when it comes to McCain.

"A void that might be filled, while the Democrats fight it, out by the press is not going to be filled, because the press is in love with John McCain," Brock said in an interview at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan. "It's what McCain is allowed to say without being challenged by facts that will show him to have said something different in the past."

Media Matters has become such a shrill outfit, quick to take comments out of context in their efforts to smear conservatives, that they really can't be taken that seriously. The mainstream media has been burned more than once by reporting a Media Matters "scoop" only to have the story blow up on them.

There will be a media blowback against McCain, but probably not until the Dem nomination is decided. There's too much interest in that fight for the press to care much about McCain. And given the openness with which McCain courts the press, he is likely to get better treatment than a candidate that hides from them.

Soros is wasting his money.