Democratic Party financier George Soros, who puts much of the blame for Islamic terrorists on America and former president George W. Bush, can celebrate his first foothold inside the Pentagon.
It is in the person of Rosa Brooks, far-left former Los Angeles Times columnist. She was once counsel to billionaire Soros' Open Societies Institute, whose funding arm bankrolls a number of hard-left pressure groups, such as MoveOn.org. MoveOn.org, of course, is the Washington outfit that smeared Gen. David Petraeus as a betrayer of his country, and depicted Bush in a Web ad as Adolph Hitler.
Brooks, who has also likened Bush to Hitler and claims the former president is "psychotic" and "fanatical," will not be a minor player. The Pentagon's No. 3 official and top policymaker, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, has selected Brooks as a "principal adviser."
The title means Brooks will have the constant ear of the Defense Department's policy chief as Flournoy weighs in on the budget, troop deployments, secret missions and weapons buying. In the Pentagon bureaucratic elevator, every major decision flows through Flournoy's shop on its way to the defense secretary.
Some in the Pentagon, normally a conservative and patriotic enclave, are reacting with alarm at Brooks' appointment. One Gates staffer told Human Events that Brooks is an "extremist." The source emphasized she was Flournoy's appointment, not Gates'. "Gates did not hire her," the official said.
"Any time you have people with extreme views on the right or left it makes people nervous here," said a senior official.
In response to a query from Human Events, the Defense Department provided Brooks' job description. She is a "principal adviser" to Flournoy to "develop cross regional planning." In other words, Brooks will help shape the Pentagon's relations with foreign governments and militaries.
Later, the department amended her job description. "Ms. Brooks was hired as a Special Advisor to the USDP to address a range of issues of interest to the Undersecretary, including speechwriting and special projects," the statement said.
Brooks has left a paper trail at the Los Angeles Times. Her columns are full of vitriolic, name-calling attacks on Bush and his aides that do not seem to comport with the job of a practical military policy maker.
She depicts Bush as Hitler, mentally ill, and a liar. She embraces all the jargon of the hard Left without even a paragraph of context, such as describing the murderous enemies America faces and how unprepared it was to fight al Qaeda immediately after September 11, 2001. And she is highly partisan. On Rachel Maddow's hard-left MSNBC show, Brooks said Sen. John McCain was "lying like crazy."
A sampling of Brooks' writing:
- "George W. Bush and Dick Cheney shouldn't be treated like criminals who deserve punishment. They should be treated like psychotics who need treatment."
- "The Bush administration's big legal lies paved the way for some of the most shameful episodes in our history, including the official authorization of torture."
- Of the Iraqi shoe-throwing journalist, "He reminded the powerful and powerless alike that a single symbolic gesture can be more effective than a thousand grenades."
- Accused Bush of telling "big lies," adding, "As Hitler demonstrated, some small part of the most 'impudent lies' will always remain and stick. Big lies leave little lies in their wake, changing the political discourse in enduring, difficult-to-detect ways."
[One of the "big lies" was Bush's assertion that Saddam Hussein still possessed weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Bush based his claim an official CIA assessment. Two bipartisan panels found unanimously there was no evidence that the White House politicized the intelligence finding. Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Iraq in 1999 based on similar findings.
Another fact: Internal Iraqi documents unearthed after the invasion revealed a working relationship between Saddam's notorious intelligence service and various Islamic terror groups.]
Brooks also likened Bush to Iranian's Israel-threatening leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Like the terror-supporter, Brooks said Bush's speeches are "ridiculous, provocative, uneducated and fanatical."
And there is this 2007 column. To Brooks, al Qaeda was not much of a threat, until Bush got into the act. "It was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky - but despite the unexpected success of their attack on the U.S., they did not pose an imminent mortal threat to the nation. Today, things are different. Thanks to U.S. policies, al Qaeda has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001."
We can expect Brooks' plum appointment to be just one of many in the Obama administration from the world of George Soros, who finances hard-left groups such as MoveOn.org and bankrolls liberal politicians through his Democracy Alliance.
After all, at a left wing rally earlier this decade, Soros received a rousing introduction from Hillary Clinton, now the Secretary of State who is busy festooning her bureaucracy with liberals.
Soros tapped his personal fortune in 2003-04 to defeat Bush's reelection, calling it "the central focus of my life and "a matter of life and death."
Like his acolyte Rosa Brooks, Soros likes to compare Bush to Hitler, who exterminated 6 million Jews.
"When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' " Soros said, "it reminds me of the Germans. It conjures up memories of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit [The enemy is listening]. My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me."
In his book, "The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror," he wrote, "The Bush administration and the Nazi and communist regimes all engaged in the politics of fear. Indeed, the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and Communist propaganda machines by drawing on the innovations of the advertising and marketing industries."
After two years of the U.S. fight terrorists, Soros had this assessment: "There are many more people willing to risk their lives to kill Americans than there were on September 11.” He offered no proof, but the message is clear: the U.S. is to blame for terrorist. Brooks would make the same claim in her 2007 column.
Brooks qualifications for such an important Pentagon post are suspect. She is a human rights lawyer, law school professor and worked for the Kerry-Edwards campaign.
A Defense Department statement to Human Events said, "Ms. Brooks brings to the position a thorough knowledge of U.S. and foreign national security and diplomatic objectives and the ability to quickly master the broad range of issues and functional responsibilities under the purview of the under secretary. "
