Six Degrees of George Soros

The word has gone out from the Republican National Committee to their spinners in the media: use any and all means to attack George Soros. Soros is a Dubya critic with money and is therefore viewed as a particular threat. Things quickly turned ugly with Washington insider Tony Blankley's outright anti-Semetic attack on Soros: "He was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the holocaust." The fangs had to come in a bit after that one but now there's a new game to find links, however tenuous, between Soros and, like, bad stuff.

So readers of the Wall Street Journal today go the editorial page and find the following:

THE AMERICAS
How to Lose Friends in Latin America

George Soros gets millions, but what does the American taxpayer get?
By Mary Anastasia O'Grady


Duly intrigued, we wade through the entire article (subs. req'd), which concerns a convoluted dispute between the US State Department and an Ecuadorian activist, looking for this bombshell revelation about that awful Soros, and then it comes:

While Mr. Teran [the activist] has had to go to the mattresses for his project, [the US Agency for International Development] has "obligated" more than $9 million to the Soros Foundations and George Soros's Open Society Institute since 1994. Recall that Mr. Soros is a renowned critic of the classical economic liberalism that made America great.

So that's it: USAID is not giving money to a particular project. USAID has given money to a George Soros-supported institution, along of course with the thousands of other projects that USAID has supported over the same period. Spin mission accomplished.