FINALLY! The Alabama Gubernatorial race is heating up!
Democratic candidate for governor Walt Maddox has started hitting Governor Kay Ivey over an alleged health situation with no evidence she actually has one. The person who they are using to concoct this scheme is a disgruntled former state employee who has known Maddox for 25 years and, despite their protestation, the whole thing was planned out with Walt Maddox.
Boring.
Now we are moving on to pretending Ivey is a George Soros-supported candidate.
Yes, Ivey took money from a political action committee (PAC) that Soros has donated to. Yes, you can make the argument, if you need to, that Maddox and Ivey are both supported by the liberal billionaire. But does it actually make sense?
No.
After Yellowhammer News reported George Soros donated $200,000 to Tuscaloosa PACs this week, PACs that have given Mayor Walt Maddox $600k+ overall this cycle. Maddox’s defenders accurately pointed out that those PACs gave Ivey money as well.
There are some issues with the premise of these points.
Our PAC laws are pathetic. They are nothing more than organization created by political operatives to “wash” money from political operators like George Soros so candidates can create plausible deniability of the source of their funding.
It works like this: Consider a PAC to be a pool. George Soros or conservative contributor Sheldon Adelson walk up to the pool and dump in a pitcher of water. After this, the PAC operator walks to the other side of the pool and takes a dixie cup of water out for himself and then takes a tumbler full of water and hands it to a political candidate. The candidate then drinks the water. Who can say that water is from Soros or Adelson? No one can say it wasn’t.
In reality, there is little we can do about this stuff, every law that is passed creates another incentive for a loophole to be created. It’s not right and surely isn’t good, but it is obviously a reality in Alabama and elsewhere.
The fact is PAC funding is a mess, the pass-through process is a joke, but the idea that Soros is giving Ivey money is a comical deflection that no one with any scruples would try to make, so people are.
Soros is a liberal, a hardcore European coastal elite liberal’s liberal. Business Insider describes him this way, in a piece that is pro-Soros:
Soros, who is worth $25 billion, has been at the center of conspiracy theories since he first rose to the top echelons of hedge fund managers in the 1990s. But he really attracted attention in 2004, when he gave money to groups that sought to block President George W. Bush’s reelection bid. His entry into politics, coupled with Soros’ choice to repeatedly speak out against the Iraq War, set off a long-lasting string of conspiracy theories alleging that Soros tried to influence politics with nefarious intent.
“George Soros first found himself in the crosshairs of the conservative propaganda machine when he publicly expressed opposition to the march to war in Iraq,” said Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Soros Fund Management. Since then, Soros has continued to donate large sums of money to organizations that support democratic reform in the US and throughout the world. Some saw that as a sign of scheming secretive plots.
Right-leaning sites like Breitbart and The Washington Times have often claimed that Soros paid protesters at the Women’s March and the March for Science. In reality, Soros has been giving money to progressive groups since long before Trump’s election. In 2017, some of them decided to participate in protests.
Whatever you think of PACs, and you should be thinking about this if you care about campaign fundraising, and whatever you think of Soros, Governor Ivey’s response to the idea that he is funding here is perfect, “Bottom line is [if] George Soros puts $200 [thousand] in Alabama elections, for sure it’s not for conservatives like I am.”
@TheDaleJackson is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts a conservative talk show from 7-11 am weekdays on WVNN
