RSSPuzzled by Pat Buchanan
Aug 04
Over the last few years I had always heard of Pat as a ultra-conservative. One day, a while ago, I looked him up for some reason and most of the websites I encountered declared that he was an ultra-conservative, semi-fascist, racist bigot (like http://www.realchange.org/buchanan.htm)
Then one day, while tuning into the The McLaughlin Group on PBS I noticed that Pat was a panelist, and my interest was piqued. The topic that day was the 9/11 Commission report. The issue posed was “What was the biggest unanswered question in the report?” When they got to Pat, his was comment was along the lines of “They never asked why they hated us so much? It’s clearly not because they hate our values, as the Administration said.”
I was shocked. I’ve never heard a conservative politician/speaker say anything close to this. The typical line, as Pat said, is “They hate our values.” This line is total garbage, especially proven by the stated goal of Al Qaeda to “remove US troops from Saudi Arabia.”
The next week, when the topic was the Democratic convention, Pats comment about Kerry was “I’d vote for him, except he isn’t Republican.” To me this showed a remarkable level of unbiased-ness to both admit his feelings and his affiliations.
So, my question is, what’s the deal with Pat? I’m really very interested and haven’t been able to find too much credible-sounding information on the web so far. Is he really an ultra-conservative fascist? Is he just moderating himself while on the McLaughlin Group to appear more centered? My gut feeling is that the answer to both those questions is yes, but would like more information. Please comment if you have any.
Aug 04, 2004 @ 16:57:32
You’ve got the “racist bigot” part right. I think he referred to some Russian poet as a “porch-nigger” during the Soviet era. A lot of black people were killed by whites (maybe 60 or 70 or so) during one clash in Apartheid South Africa – Pat later described this as “a few black people being mistreated by whites.” So as not to diminish the ugliness of the Holocaust, I strongly hesitate to compare anyone to Hitler, but Pat Buchanan is as close to a National Socialist as any semi-mainstream American politician comes.
While he pays lip service to some mainstream fiscal conservative issues like tax cuts, he’s strongly isolationist, which is contrary to the typical Republican position. Remember that giant protest at the WTO in Seattle? Pat was marching there – he doesn’t like the idea of free trade.
While I concede that Bush is far from perfect on issues of free trade, bear in mind that Buchanan wants to pull out of the WTO, out of the FTAA, out of NAFTA, out of every multilateral trade agreement and tariff the hell out of absolutely everything coming into the country, the American consumer be damned.
When Quebec was talking secession, he wanted to annex Quebec. Despite that they’re not talking about secession from Denmark (as far as I know), he wants to annex Greenland. While he’s upset about the war in Iraq, he’s probably mostly upset that we’ve given Iraq back to the Iraqis – I suspect he’d probably be all right with the war if we were annexing Iraq.
The mainstream American conservative movement has all but disowned Pat Buchanan and his views. Hell, even Rush Limbaugh has disowned him. Personally, other than the tax cuts issue, I don’t think there’s a conservative thing about Pat Buchanan. Pat’s pretty bitter about the fact that his views have been so marginalized among the American conservatives, so I guess he’s trying to get some traction on the issues about which he agrees with Democrats – anti free-trade (Kerry’s talked about pulling out of NAFTA), pro-labor, etc…, but I suspect the Democrats (aside from perhaps Senator Robert Byrd) won’t have any of it given Buchanan’s disgustingly racist past.