Liberal Radio and Its Dark Angel: Meet the amazing Sheldon Drobny.

'Everything is going very well," says Sheldon Drobny of his new project, the much-publicized move to create a liberal talk-radio network. "We're moving along toward being on the air in early January. In fact, we're going to be on the air in a very big way."

Drobny is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist in Chicago. Along with his wife Anita, he has put $10 million into what the New York Times has called "the most ambitious undertaking yet to come from liberal Democrats who believe they are overshadowed in the political propaganda wars by conservative radio and television personalities." To run the network, the Drobnys created a company called AnShell Media, and they have spent the last several months looking for investors willing to put more money into the venture.

"I'm a devoted capitalist," Drobny says. "The fact is, there is an audience out there. If you have a consistent message on a network which has 14 to 16 hours a day programming, you will get an audience equal to what Rush Limbaugh has."

Drobny declined to comment on who will appear on the network, but it's well known that his top talent choice is the conservative-bashing comedian Al Franken. It appears that the two sides have not yet come to terms, but in August, Franken told the liberal web magazine Salon that "there's been progress, and chances are growing that this will happen and I'll be a part of it."

Many liberals look to Drobny as a leader in the movement to "fight back" against what they contend is conservative media bias. Indeed, both Drobnys have been virtually canonized by some liberal commentators. "Mr. and Mrs. Drobny, I salute you, you're wonderful," Newsweek's Anna Quindlen wrote in July. The Drobnys, she added, "are my kind of folks" (although Quindlen doubted liberals would be able to master "the technique of disdain, derogation and dismissal" that she said characterized conservative talk radio).

But there is another side to Sheldon Drobny, one that has not been included in the news accounts of the talk-radio project. In addition to his businesses and philanthropies (he has given large sums of money to hospitals, universities, and Jewish causes), Drobny enjoys writing. He writes an occasional column for a small website called MakeThemAccountable.com, and in it he has aligned himself with the wilder-eyed extremes of the Bush-hating Left.

For example, Drobny has written that he sees similarities between President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq and the pre-World War II strategy of Adolf Hitler. "The corporate masters and their current spokesman, George W. Bush . . . use exactly the same excuses Hitler used to sell to the public his maniacal desire to conquer Europe," Drobny wrote earlier this year. Those corporate masters, he explained, included General Electric, News Corporation, and the conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife, a group that "essentially dictate[s] what the government does" in a process Drobny called "quasi- fascist."

Drobny has also worried that Americans do not understand the Bush family's extensive links to the Nazis. "Very few Americans know that Prescott Bush, our president's grandfather, supplied Nazi Germany with [support for its rearmament]," he wrote on MakeThemAccountable.com. "The information is documented, but is not known by most Americans because, as in any successful fascist regime, the press is prevented from publishing it."

In response to an e-mail inquiry about his writings, Drobny sent as documentation a chapter from a 1991 book, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. The authors argue that Prescott Bush got rich helping finance the Third Reich, and the money he made became the core of the Bush family's wealth. "For his part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid a fortune," Tarpley and Chaitkin write. "This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush." And of course, the first President Bush is leaving that legacy to his son, President George W. Bush.

That particular chapter of Tarpley and Chaitkin's book-entitled "The Hitler Project"-has been cited on popular left-wing websites, such as Buzzflash.com and Bartcop.com. But Tarpley and Chaitkin are not in the mainstream of opposition to the president. Both men are longtime associates of the fringe political figure Lyndon LaRouche, and George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography was published by a LaRouche organization called Executive Intelligence Review. The same press has also published titles like "George Bush and the 12333 Serial Murder Ring"-an attempt to link the former president and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to the 1986 murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme-and "Would a President Bob Dole Prosecute Drug Super-Kingpin George Bush?"

Tarpley and Chaitkin's book received no notice in the press, but their charges were repeated a few years later in another book, The Secret War Against the Jews, by authors John Loftus and Mark Aarons. Commenting on that book in 1995, Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman called it "so exaggerated, so scantily documented, so overwrought and convoluted in its presentation, that Loftus and Aarons render laughable their claim to offer 'a glimpse of the world as it really is.'"

Nevertheless, Drobny takes the alleged Bush/Nazi connection very seriously. "If Prescott Bush built his family's wealth on the backs of slave labor and the Nazi regime, what responsibility does the Bush family have to own up to that?" Drobny asks. "I don't suggest that I blame him for his grandfather's sins, but I do suggest that if a family has built wealth on the backs of slave labor, what is their responsibility?"

Drobny wants to emphasize that his comparison of George W. Bush to Hitler is quite specific and limited. "I wasn't comparing Bush to Hitler on the racism side," he explains. "I don't believe George Bush is a racist or has or will ever have genocidal beliefs. What I'm talking about is fascism."

Still, since Drobny is the guiding force and the main financial backer of the new liberal talk-radio network, the question arises: Would these ideas be a good subject for the new network? "I'm not suggesting that at all," says Drobny. "As a venture capitalist, I'm not the one who does the programming, nor would I interject my own opinion into programming."

But what would such programming be? Beyond Al Franken, there have been few names mentioned as potential hosts on the new network. One name that has been discussed is that of Mike Malloy, a former talk-show host on WLS radio in Chicago and WSB radio in Atlanta. A May 13 article in Salon entitled "Where's the liberal Rush Limbaugh?" asked the question: "Mike Malloy's left-wing rants have gotten him bounced from major radio markets. Could he draw an audience of millions if he got the chance?"

Having been fired in Chicago and Atlanta-not an unusual fate in the radio business-Malloy now broadcasts on something called the i.e.America Radio Network, which is a full-time, if little-known, liberal talk-show network owned by the United Auto Workers.

Each of Malloy's programs has a topic, and some recent topics include: "Is It Time for the Bastard's Impeachment?" (Malloy liked the topic so much he devoted three programs to it), "What's Your Life Worth to the Bush Crime Family?," "The Scum Who Heads the Justice Department," and "The Bastards Continue To Lie."

Is such fare too rough-edged for a mass audience? "I don't think so," says Malloy. "Just go back to the '90s, with 'The Clinton Chronicles,' Hillary is a lesbian, Bill and Hillary are drug dealers, Bill and Hillary left a trail of bodies. You have a talk radio that has been breastfed on 'Hillary and Bill are murderers' and radicalized by a thug like Rush Limbaugh, with the crumbs swept up by a junior thug like Sean Hannity-and then somebody wants to ask me if I'm being a little bit strong in saying that John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act are totally, totally destroying constitutional government in this country?"

Malloy is highly thought of at AnShell Media. "I love Mike Malloy," says Drobny, who listened to him on the radio in Chicago. "I think he's a great entertainer. You'll love him or you'll hate him." Malloy is also influential in the company; AnShell's new CEO, a veteran radio executive named Jon Sinton, reportedly got his job in part on Malloy's recommendation.

While there remain many questions about how the new network will take shape, it seems clear from the Malloy association that organizers favor very hard-hitting stuff. Whether the network will earn much credibility is another matter, especially if some of Drobny's writings become well known.

And if the network succeeds, Drobny will likely become a more familiar figure, and, perhaps, a more controversial one. In the 1990s, conservatives came under heavy criticism for relying on funding from the foundation run by Richard Mellon Scaife. Liberal commentators routinely portrayed Scaife as a right-wing zillionaire who harbored dark visions about the evil nature of his political adversaries. Now, it is a zillionaire on the left-the guiding force behind liberalism's premier outreach effort-who harbors dark visions about the evil nature of his political adversaries. And that is the face of liberal talk radio.