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George Soros is dedicating his life to defeating George Bush. He feels that Bush has the same dangerous tendencies that Soros suffered, first under Hitler and then under the Soviets.

A belief that God is on your side, that contrary evidence is mere bias and that those who oppose you are non-patriots marks the extremist, even if their God is ideology.

Unfortunately Soros, by focusing on the extremism of Bush and the Righteous Right, misses the larger picture of our problems with democracy. If an enemy attacks you, most agree that you must take up arms and defeat him. But that doesn't mean you believe in war. In similar fashion, Soros needs to focus his war against Bush beyond this inferior presidency. Defeating Bush by outspending him is a bit like defeating Osama bin Laden by restricting freedoms and wounding innocents.

Fifty years ago political theorist Robert Dahl said."the only thing democratic about an American presidential election is an honest tabulation of the ballots." For a long time there has been a trend against reason, merit and honesty. Instead, more and more, an American president has come to resemble a monarch. Tom Paine explained that a monarch is unfit to lead for three reasons: (1) inbreeding leads to poor stock, (2) a closet upbringing yields a person who can not relate to the everyday world, and (3) a surrounding of sycophants shields the decision-maker from balanced facts vital to the decision. Benjamin Franklin warned the Constitutional Convention that it's form of Executive would lead to someone like Bush.

In George Bush we only have to replace inbreeding with breeding to see why his presidency is a monarchy in modern clothing. We have to ask Soros, "If you win now, what is to protect against another extremist in the near future?"

Clearly, our current system is a product of democratic decline, a decline where bribes are called donations and advertising is called debate.

George Soros needs to do for Americans what he has tried to do for the world: Improve democracy. There are several explicit ways that this could be done, but if Bush is defeated by cash and cant it will soon become business as usual.

David Dietrich is the author of a forthcoming book: "Ask the 300 Year-Old Man." His email is dietrich1787@yahoo.com