Okay, so perhaps the headline is a bit much, but I really wanted it to read like something Glenn Beck might say while doodling on his infamous chalkboard about how Soros is so incredibly powerful that he's even wormed his way into Palin's inner circle. I'm sure that line of Beckian reasoning would be followed by a convoluted flow chart tying the former half-term Governor of Alaska directly to us here at Media Matters. Shudder. It's enough to drive a grown man to tears (on his own Fox News program.)

Salon.com's Justin Elliott reports:

Glenn Beck spent the past week denouncing the liberal billionaire and philanthropist George Soros as a “puppet master” who is orchestrating a coup “to bring America to her knees.”

Given Soros' alleged role plotting to destroy the United States, Beck and his Fox viewership might be surprised to learn that one of Sarah Palin's top aides has been on Soros' payroll for years.

That would be Republican lobbyist Randy Scheunemann, Palin's foreign policy adviser and a member of her small inner circle. He runs a Washington, D.C., consulting firm called Orion Strategies. Scheunemann and a partner have since 2003 been paid over $150,000 by one of Soros' organizations for lobbying work, according to federal disclosure forms reviewed by Salon. The lobbying, which has continued to the present, centers on legislation involving sanctions and democracy promotion in Burma.

Scheunemann's client is the Open Society Policy Center, a DC-based advocacy group founded and funded by Soros. The Open Society Policy Center says on its website that it “encourages Congress and the Administration to press the military dictatorship in Burma to restore political rights and democracy.”

[...]

Scheunemann is known as a longtime neoconservative who pushed for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and for support for Georgia. He has been strongly identified with Palin since he met her while working as the chief foreign policy adviser of the McCain campaign in 2008 (see a classic picture of Scheunemann and Palin doing debate prep here). Since then, Scheunemann has taken on an increasingly prominent role in Palin-land. He traveled with her to Hong Kong for a speech in September 2009. In the second quarter of 2010, Scheunemann's Orion Strategies was paid $30,000 by Palin's political action committee for consulting on “national and international issues.”

The government documents reference by Elliott above can be found after the jump.