Taking Aim At Soros Is Hardly Politic

But Davis has another problem with Soros, too. He's an "out of towner." Listening to Davis, you wonder if he's next going to say Soros's Hungarian accent is too thick.

"I mean, to me, Soros is the guy who has so much money and wants to buy the world," Davis said. "I mean that's not what baseball's about. This is above all a fan sport. This is the Nationals, and they're going to give it to some multinational?"

The argument that Soros is the wrong person to own a stake in the Nats because of his politics, or his business dealings, or some perceived character flaws, is an insidious one. There are no fewer than eight bidders for the Nats, and every single one of them is engaged politically in some way.

And all of them have warts. You want a wart? Malek has a big one. Malek is a former Richard Nixon aide. When he was White House personnel chief, he was summoned by Nixon to discuss a "Jewish cabal" in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nixon believed Jews in the bureau were tilting stats to make his policies look bad. He wanted to know how many Jews there were in the bureau, and he wanted Malek to count them. Malek eventually complied and produced a list. Some of them were later demoted or transferred. Malek, who insists he is not anti-Semitic, has said that he resisted the order at first and argued with Nixon that there was no "cabal."

This is the sort of ugliness you get into when you start weighing the political desirability of baseball owners. Okay, Soros is a convicted felon in France. George Steinbrenner is a convicted felon in this country. A pardoned one, but still.

If congressmen want to ban major Democratic fundraisers from MLB, could they please start with Peter Angelos? Surely he's a more "polarizing" figure than George Soros? And then there is Rupert Murdoch, who as the head of Fox was nominally in charge of the Dodgers. Another "polarizing" figure. A lot of people find President Bush rather "polarizing," and he owned the Texas Rangers (along with Malek).

But polarizing to whom? Those who disagree with them? Or are they not polarizing, because they are conservatives? And then you have baseball commissioner Bud Selig, who "polarized" Milwaukee by engineering one of the more rapacious stadium deals in recent memory. What about Coors Field? Now there's a polarizing family, the Coors. But they get their name on a ballpark because they earned it the old-fashioned way: They put up the money.

Just like Soros wants to.

It would serve Davis and Sweeney right if Soros were to win a stake in the team. There may be a very simple and primal partisan reason why Republicans are so opposed to a Soros ownership of the Nats. If Soros is an owner of the club, does that mean the R's get really lousy seats and the D's get all the good ones?

"I don't think I'll be getting good season tickets if he gets the team," Davis admitted.