PATRICK BUCHANAN: PRESIDENTIAL MATERIAL?
"You should at least respect the man's balls in this PC era of mealy-mouthed phonies."
Dear Frank,
Thank you for keeping me in mind with these e-mails about Pat Buchanan's run for the presidency. I have checked out several of the links and articles included in them, but, alas, I remain unconvinced. Since you made the effort to e-mail me about "Pitchfork Pat," I take the liberty to write you in return some of my thoughts on the matter.
I will speak first about Buchanan's stance on America's domestic situation and then foreign affairs second. I apologize for speaking at some length, but the issues in question require it.
In doing research on Buchanan's latest book "A Republic, Not an Empire," I came across the following reader review at Amazon:
kaznicki@msn.com from USA , September 21, 1999
Excellent companion to the Great Betrayal I read the Great Betrayal with enthusiasm, not knowing very much about Pat Buchanan previosuly. His discourse was enlightening and ground breaking in that it didn't merely diagnose problems, but it detailed solutions - solutions drawn from the American tradition. I learned a lot from that book and looked forward to this one eagerly. It did not disappoint. Pat may be catching some flack because he is brave enough to interpret WWII and America's role in it in a way that doesn't settle well with some, but I invite all to read this and see that it is not a book just about WWII, but about the entirety of American history and the traditions and patterns that have been prevelant throughout. I highly recommend this book, not just because of my new found favor for Pat Buchanan, but because I think it is an excellent and thought provoking discourse about the American past, present, and future - something all Americans should take the time to think about.This reader review seems to me emminently sensible, and I myself cannot see to talk about Buchanan without referring to American history in some detail. Buchanan is not a phenomenon not new to America, as I will show; and I dislike him for exactly the same reasons I disliked his historical antecedents in the American past. In particular, I see Buchanan playing a role similar to the ones played by John C. Calhoun and William Jennings Bryan in earlier eras. What role is this? They all see their nation moving in a direction not to their liking, and so fight the tides of changes futilely and loudly. They have all been on the losing side of history, as is Buchanan. Let me explain.
Constantly re-inventing and re-defining itself, the United States is a restless, forward-looking country. Change is a constant in American history, as innovation and a pragmatic experimentation leads Americans to try to do better what has been done in times past. This dynamicism, in my opinion, has much to do with how in only two centuries the United States from a weak provincial backwater in 1787 has become today at the 20th century the predominant nation on earth. But if capitalism has proved an exemplary at producing wealth and if its incessantly changing economy is good for those able to adaptible and resilient, it is not without costs for those who cannot compete and who fail to stay abreast of trends and innovations. In a word, capitalism has its losers as well as winners; and Buchanan is speaking for the losers in the present day economy, as did Calhoun and Bryan in their own times. Announcing his recent defection from the Republican to the Reform Party in yet another run for the White House, Buchanan made the following hyperbolic statement: "This is our last chance to save our republic before she dissapears into the godless New World Order that our elites are constructing in a betrayal of everything for which our Founding Fathers lived, fought and died." If the United States is at a crossroads in terms of her future, Buchanan claims we have taken the wrong road. Such claims have been made before in U.S. history.
Take John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, for example. The first few decades of the 19th century saw U.S. politics dominated by Southern aristocrats who thrived in agricultural societies underwritten by cotton trade and slave labor. The first four out of five presidents -- Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe -- were all members of the "Virginia dynasty" and their interests and wishes ruled the day. But with the increasing industrialization in the North and the burgeoning power of new Western territories this began to change. In 1822, it was the nationalistic war hero Andrew Jackson -- a commoner, a self-made man born poor but who made good. And in the north the factories continued to produce wealth in urban enclaves in a Hamiltonian way of life antithetical to the Jeffersonian advocates of rural splendor and the "Southern way of life" based on slave labor. The "new economy" of that day was centered in large, impersonal Northern cities dotted by filthy, furness-like factories churning out smoke and fire like some spot of hell. Northern society, according to its Southern critics, had become impersonal with a factory wage system filled with the unwashed immigrants -- an arrangement worse than slavery itself! This vision of America they were willing to fight with succession and war, fearing the loss of power and the rise of an industrial America that would leave them behind. Calhoun preferred the plantation lifestyle of intimate familial relations between slaves and masters, as they saw it urban northern factories and the cold indifference of wage labor. (A slave might see the relationship in a different light, of course.) The South saw its vision of the future based on a romanticized rural past, and it rejected the Northern industrial path and the way of life it represented. The South saw abolitionist "outsiders" meddling in their sovereign affairs and challenging their "way of life." They bristled at the loud calls for the abolition of slavery from prissy New England churchmen.
And so of course the plantation economy of John C. Calhoun's South Carolina was based on slave labor. It is true most white Southerners did not own slaves, but the aristocratic few like Calhoun who did did held all the power and made all the decisions in those socieites: "the peculiar institution [ie. slavery]" was indeed fundamental to their "way of life." The Founding Fathers from the South had all written despairingly about slavery in their midst and its direct conflict with the principles of freedom and equality. They had hoped to see its removal in happier future eras when conditions were more propitious and mankind more enlightened; but by the time Calhoun sat on center stage in the U.S. Senate, the Southern aristocracy had hardened their stand on slavery and brooked no interference with their "property" by anyone. By 1838 Calhoun claimed:
This [antislavery] agitation has produced one happy effect; it has compelled us to the South to look into the nature and character of this great institution [of slavery], and to correct many false impressions that even we had entertained in relation to it. Many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now it its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world."John C. Calhoun could see the future plainly by the 1830's, and it was not favorable for a continued preeminent position for the South in the American body politic. With good reason, he feared the power and money of northern industrialists. He feared the opening up of new territories to potentially non-slave states, altering the balance of power in Congress in his disfavor: further states admitted to the Union meant more lawmakers and a dilution of Southern ability to block Northern legislation. "We will be held in thralldom," he warned the South.Like Pat Buchanan, Calhoun could perceptively see the future -- and it was one he did not like. Like Buchanan, Calhoun was a highly educated person imbued with giant intellectual gifts and a wonderful gift of eloquency. Like Buchanan, however, Calhoun suffered from a stupidity of the heart that no amount of intellect could overcome. Take a look at the following political cartoon:
John C. Calhoun Commands the Sun:
"Son of intellectual light & liberty, stand ye still in masterly inactivity,
that the Nation of Carolina may continue to hold negroes & plant cotton
till the day of Judgement!"Calhoun wanted to freeze mid-19th century American society exactly as it had been in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson was elected president, as Buchanan wants to bring back the United States as it supposedly was before the upheavels of the 1960's and globalization and the advent of information technology. Nevertheless, to try to arrest change is but to postpone it -- and probably in an unhealthy and unnatural way. What motivated Calhoun was fear of change, just as the same fear motivates the labor unions, animal rights groups, rain-forest protection networks, patriot militias, communists, and anarchists that oppose globalization of trade. Fear of the future, and they are on the losing side.
Calhoun's South Carolina declared in 1832 that it could declare null and void any federal law it found contrary to the Constitution. If the South could not win against Northern business interests, then it would simply refuse to recognize federal laws. This was the first in a long series of steps that led to Civil War and the near complete ruin of Calhoun's planter class -- as well as the deaths of some 600,000 Americans, or 1 in every 32 persons in the country. President Jackson had little patience for South Carolina threatening the unity of the country and threatened to try and hang anyone who would commit treason against the United States government, and threatened Calhoun with as much in private. Many times I have contemplated with pleasure the spectacle of Jackson hanging Calhoun responsible for so much bloodshed... like Calhoun twenty years before Fort Sumter. But nothing would have changed: Calhoun would have been replaced by someone else sharing his seccesionist point of view. In retrospect, the intractable political differences of the 1840's and 1850's afflicting the United States could not have been effectively decided any other way than through blood and steel -- as Winston Churchill has perspicaciously noted, the American Civil War was one of the most "unavoidable of all wars." A sobering but true thought, this is.
Calhoun and the other Southern aristocrats saw happier times could be had under their own flag. Seeing a threat to the agrarian "Southern way of life" and its "peculiar institution" of slavery, Southerners like Calhoun gambled everything on the Confederacy and then lost everything in a massively bloody war; but America continued onwards on the Northern vision and was an industrialized, international power by the end of the 19th century. Latin America did in fact cling to the neo-feudal way of life desired by the slavocracy of the antebellum South; this explains much of why both Mississippi and Managua are shitholes. New York and London, in contrast, were and are centers of world power.
Calhoun and the other Southern aristocrats, like Buchanan and some others today, threatened gloom and doom if their Jeremiads were not heeded. TALK HERE ABOUT THE GETT ADDRSS AND NEW GOV'T OF POST-CIVIL WAR NOW GO ON TO TALK ABOUT MARX AND CHANGE "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned." One cannot understand Pat Buchanan except in the role of outsider with a critique of the status quo. At the first Buchanan website I visited , one is immediately faced with a banner shouting: "Look out Establishment!") Back in the Nixon Administration where he was a speechwriter, Buchanan stood against the New Left and the excesses of the Great Society to the point where he went even too far for his bosses, and today he is against the New Economy of the Information Age and an activist role for the United States on the international stage. As I see it, he is supported mostly by lower middle-class and poor whites who feel as if they have not benefitted from the economic changes wrought by global trade during the past two decades. Buchanan has a valid concern upto a point, is that is precisely the section of the population that has seen its earning power decline. Why should a factory worker make 40k a year to do semi-skilled labor when it could be done better in Mexico or Malaysia for much cheaper? It is good question. The laborer in Mexico or Malaysia would be happy for the otherwise absent job, and I as a consumer in the U.S. am happy with the lower price of finished goods; companies are better able to sell products at a lower price and do more business. More profittable businesses equal a robust stock market, big dividends, and more jobs for workers to supply increased demand. Capitalism has found a way, as it always has, to be even more competitive and efficient.
Of course for all the material benefits it brings to a society, capitalism is blind to its social consequences. If so many people are more prosperous and more influential than before, and if this country is richer than ever in its history, then there are segments outside the global economy that remain out in the cold -- hence, Buchanan's appeal to the disgruntled and resentful. They complain that the goal of the U.S. gov't should be to preserve jobs for Americans, even if those jobs are uncompetitive, redundant, or unnecessary. Buchanan carries the flag of the left-out: "America first!" He sees the gain of a worker in a Mexican maquilladora as the loss of a Detroit auto worker; many such jobs have indeed fled overseas, and others have been replaced by automation -- this is the reality of the "new economy." The changes are painful, even traumatic, for some. Hence Buchanan, the outsider/critic, as a lighting rod for their dissafection. This is hardly the first time wrenching economic changes have created stresses and fissures in our society. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the English peasants were dislodged from their rural lifestyles and fled to the factories in search of sustenance, bringing dislocation and ; the Luddites even went so far as to physically attack these new devilish machines, trying to arrest change. Likewise, the Southern conservatives led by John Calhoun objected to the rising of influence and prosperity of Northern industrialists. They saw it, rightly, as a threat to the agrarian "Southern way of life" and its "peculiar institution" of slavery. The "new economy" of that day was centered in large, impersonal cities dotted by filthy, furness-like factories churning out smoke and fire like some spot of hell. Society had become inpersonal with a factory wage system filled with the unwashed immigrants -- an arrangement worse than slavery itself! This vision of America they were willing to fight with succession and war, fearing the loss of power and the rise of an industrial America that would leave them behind. They gambled everything on the Confederacy, and then lost everything; and America continued onwards on the Northern vision and was an industrialized, international power by the end of the 19th century. Latin America did in fact cling to the neo-feudal way of life desired by the aristocracy in the antebellum South; this explains much of why both Mississippi and Managua are shitholes. New York and London, in contrast, were and are centers of world power.
Despite the nay-sayers predicting gloom and doom for America as it matured and entered into new economic and social arrangements, the sky has not fallen. Karl Marx wrote that capitalism was the mostly profoundly destructive force known to man. According to Marx: "every thing wiped away all tradition, etc....." Clearly this rhetoric is excessive. The Magna Carta, traditional liberties, Westminster Abbey, and "Englishness" did not perish in the squalid factories of Liverpool and Manchester. The democratic ideals of Thomas Jefferson and the virtue of republican government did not die on the battlefields of the Civil War; modern factories and mass society have not meant the end of civilization as we have known it from Greece, Jerusalem, Rome, and Florence onwards. The many abuses of primitive capitalism eventually led to reform and then their amelioration; mankind learned to adapt and persevere in the face of adversity and change. Mankind by nature looks for and creates stability out of chaos, and the tension between the two is constant and neverending as the world mutates incessantly and socities change. It is true what they say: that which does not grow, withers.
To artificially arrest change is to languish and rot: behold the examples of Latin America (still mired in quasi-feudalism), France (unable to afford the welfare state but unwilling and unable to change it), the Middle East (encompassing the worst of both the modern Western nation-state and medieval Islamic worlds), and the Soviet Union (rusting until it finally fell not with a bang but a whimper). In contrast, the Anglo-American world has grown into a position of primacy both in the British 19th and American 20th centuries. Much of that, in my opinion, has to do with both countries refusing to recoil from change and instead embracing it.
But the fundamental response of Buchana to all these changes in the world economy and the demographics inside the United States is fear. As we approach the beginning of the second millenium, Buchanan tirelessly pens polemics against the perceived manifold evils of today and jeremiads for what this entails for tomorrow; in contrast, yesterday is sanguine. Fear, He would hold the sun in its place, so that tomorrow could be just like today and yesterday -- although, in fact, I do not see that "yesterday" was as he says, and today is hardly so gloomy. But there it is, this fear which animated Buchanan and causes him to raise so many alarms. The wisdom of our forefathers is not unconsiderable and we should never hearken to look back to try and understand .... As Abraham Lincoln claimed, "Am I a conservative?" Yet Lincoln was not afraid to lead the country through revolutionary change into an era very different from the colonial one of his youth; he did not shirk from calling slavery wrong and outmoded, and he was not afraid to change the fabric of the United States to save it. In responding to the crises about states' rights and slavery, he assiduously studied the thinking of the Founding Fathers and then interpreted it to the needs and realities of his own troubled time. We can rest assured today that in the maelstrom of the Civil War he did not kill American freedom in passing the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Indeed, the new nation forged in the bloodshed and sacrifice of a ten thousand Civil War battlefields served to initiate "a new birth of freedom" guranateeing that "government by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth." If Buchanan had been alive in those days, he probably would have lamented the blacks and Irish not being kept in their place. He would have hated the factory owners and the political machines of the big cities and many of the other aspects of the rapidly exapanding industrial society. He would have been a curmudgeon on the wrong side of history then, just as he is now. We can mourn the manners and habits of antebellum American life much as a man approaching middle age mourn his lost youth and innocence; but that hardly means he should want to return to a style of life which was proper in the past but that he long since has outgrown. It is as they say: history has a hoary face, romance is always young. But that which is normal and proper to the young man will not serve him in his maturity; and to attempt to try and live as one did twenty years ago is stulted and very wretched. But firmly planted in the soil of tradition and custom, fear of the future should not force us to freeze time or resist natural progression of society; we should be eager to embrace a better future and save that which is immemorial from our past, while improving what can be improved. As Thomas Jefferson claimed: "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." Americans in the past, to their credit, have not been so afraid of the future. They have dynamically re-making itself every couple decades. The American people are a flexible one, pragmatically able to adapt and respond to changing economic forces and needs. The ideological imbroglios, for which the pugnacious Buchanan shows so much flair, are beasts more proper to the Europe of Weimar Germany where brown shirts and communist revolutionaries duked it out in the streets, or the Latin American cannibalism where "la guerrillera" and "los militares" fight to the death for "socialism or death!" In contrast, the United States is and has always been a relatively pragmatic country and compromise has been our saving genius. Buchanan might lament the fact that the two major political parties have come to resemble each other more everyday, but I see that as a sign of political stability. France is on their fifth republic since they killed their king; we still use the same constitution of 1789, and we have descended to serious political violence only once since. Nobody gets all of what they want, but nobody is left completely out of the cold forever, either; society and its rulers are always changing, as reform prevents the need for revolution. Thusly have we lived for over 200 years. Unlike Buchanan, I see no reason why we won't continue this way into the forseeable future.
TALK HERE ABOUT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR I am unmoved by his alarmist messages of doom and gloom. But then a moderate like me would bore Buchanan; a radical conservative like him needs a radical liberal for the sparks to fly and for a political firefight to erupt. Let them both go out into the desert and scream at each other, is what I say. Buchanan probably secretly pines away for the more hostile political climate of the 1960s and laments the consensus which emerged 30 years later and has produced the centrist policies of both mainstream Republicans and Democrats (the evil "Establishment"!). There is no true political debate in this country anymore between political parties, Buchanan claims; but he confuses "debate" with "polemic." The acerbic Buchanan is a man not of his time, and I hope it stays that away. He is like Shakespeare's embittered King Richard III whining about the "weak piping time of peace" in which he has been fated to live. I would take our age of consensus over Buchanan's vision of an America at war with itself any day. Let me add that I do find many serious problems in the United States today. For example, the increasing role of money in campaigns is a serious problem, as Buchanan claims. So many Americans have come to feel entitled to so much without having to earn or work for it. Has emerged this idea of the government as the caretaker of each individual person: I am entitled to health care, security on the streets, a middle class lifestyle, ubqiquitious entertainment, the right to not be "offended," etc. and it is the job of government to secure these for me. We have forgotten, in my opinion, that life owes nothing, in reality, and what we want we must earn. The Founding Fathers guaranteed nothing for the citizen except for certain personal rights to freedom of speech, worship, etc. And worst of all is the overweening materialism and consumerism run rampant across the land. An old man trying to reconnect with his country, John Steinbeck in Travels with Charlie reported the following during a cross-country car trip: "things..!" I say this so as not to come across as saying that everything is perfect in the United States or that improvement is impossibe here, but much of what I see wrong cannot be directly All the dumbshits who mess with drugs and allow their lives to be destroyed by them. All the ... One thing politicians almost universally lack is the humility to see that many problems out in society cannot be solved by government. Somethings need to be worked out at a lower level of individual. We have so much more personal freedom than we had even forty years ago in the United States; but personal freedom is both a burden and a blessing. Freed from external rules and constraints, a person must find their own way in life among a bewildering variety of choices. What will make us happy? What is good? What is bad? In the confusing milieu of a world ever smaller and more complex everyday, this is not so easy to distinguish. But these decisions also cannot be made much easier by anything so clumsy and impersonal as government. As teenagers shoot up their schools in places like Columbine and wackos go on murder sprees in child care centers and churches, as American mass entertainment and popular culture more and more become the laughingstock of sensitive and intelligent people around the world, we have reason to be worried about the state of America. But government can at best try to limit the damage that erupts from below; it cannot directly influence the battle between good and evil which rages inside every human heart. It can punish and reward in a very external way, but its power to convince is small at best. Amidst its many problems, there is no crisis so serious in American life today that would warrant a major intervention on the part of government. There exists today no Great Depression, Civil War, or Cold War. And I certainly see very little from Pat Buchanan that would solve what I see as America's most pressing problems. I see much that would inflame already simmering tempers among Americans and provoke further anger and hosility. space and freedom to live a private life unencubered by materialism And they are not issues really that government can or should directly meddle in. The American people will work many of these things out in time; change requires time, as custom But a certain amount of hypocrisy and is par for the course. America provides the necessary material security and comforts for the vast majority of its citizens; and newcomers and citizens alike can fight their way out of poverty if they do not shoot themselves in the foot by dropping out of school, becoming a single parent as a teenager, or getting adicted to drugs, fail to learn English, etc. Buchanan plays this role, as have such diverse and honored Americans such as Patrick Henry, Malcom X, William Jennings Bryan, DeFollet. But such men are for tearing down, and now for building up: I see today as not unlike the 1890s and the Guilded Age of railroad and oil tycoons, rapid economic growth, and discontent over widening disparity between the wealthy and the poor. This stage will, of course, no doubt come to an end and then a corrective will occur: the economy will turn sour, the need for government intervention will arise, a war will erupt and the country will take tens of thousands of combat dead. So it goes. America has dealt with it before; America will deal with it again. "The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea." G. K. Chesterton. Like his leftist counterpoint Jesse Jackson, Buchana merits a place at the table of American politics. He brings a voice to the fringe that enriches the national conversation for both good and bad, in my opinion. It might not be pretty, but it will not be silent; and so we must put up with "Pitchfork" Pat. That does not mean he should be President; that is for responsible people, who can act responsibly. Buchanan has a place at the American table; that does not mean I have to like him or vote for him. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan -- they took the high road and appealed to what was best in people, without getting into enmeshed in polemic and bareknuckle political brawling. They were "presidential." They sought to lead the whole nation, rather than just their specific backers. A beast with different stripes, Buchanan has a different role to play: provacteur, bad boy, and bete noir of the Republican Party. So it goes. I do not think him an eclectic iconoclast whose person or ideas should not be taken seriously; he is honest enough in his thinking, and there is a method to what some see as a sort of buffoon's madness. Pat Buchanan to me is obviously intelligent; nevertheless, he is meanspirited and appears to have a sickness of the soul. I find his attacks on minorities and immigrants in the United States meanspirited and counter-productive. I find his very borderline anti-Semitism suspect, to say the very least. I find his neo-isolationism myopic and injudicious, a throw back to the 1930s when the whole world burned and some in Washington D.C. preferred to fiddle (until, at least, the U.S.S. Arizona sunk beneathe the waves to the bottom of Harbor and Pearl Harbor burned). I personally dislike Pat and his whole persona. I will not vote for or support him in the year 2000 elections. I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would vote for him. I hope now you understand why. Very Truly Yours, Richard acidulous, bellicose, bilious querulous speechifier, bare-knuckle political brawler. quote and not for building up. Now is a time for a buil WWII What makes him think appeasing Hitler would work? True enough that Hitler hated the Bolsheviks more than he hated the "bourgeois liberals" in the West; Democratic liberalism appeared to be on its last legs in the 1930s: rabid Nazism had arisen from the ashes of Weimar Germany, Phoenix-like bent on vengeance, and its day seemed to have come. In Russia, the grim specter of "scientific" Communism had attacked and taken over Russia like a fever strikes and man -- millions murdered by the time Hitler attacked, everyone else living virtually in a national prision. To many both in Europe and the United States the "truth" of scientific socialism as preached by Marx and proselytized by Lenin seemed the wave of the future. "Better to be red than dead!" All this disorder begun in 1914; and the two newcomers, like two gangsters who have a falling out, were going to turn on each other sooner rather than later. But it is unrealistic to think Britain and France could have lived unscated in the disorder originating in 1914; the Left or the Right, the Fascists or the Communists, would have turned West sooner or later. The United States did not have the option to remain neutral, if we did not want to watch Great Britain go hobbled and then fight one day either Hitler or Stalin in a position of weakness. We supplied the Soviets with the material to soak up Hitler's army and then fought side by side with the British across Europe all the way to Berlin. Afterwards, we helped Western Europe to its feet and made it clear Stalin would be checked in his attempts to spread Communism elsewhere. Western Europe prospered, and finally the Soviet Union fell under the weight of its own sins and dysfunction. Western Europe, along with the Japanese in Asia, have been the dual axis points for our empire and an increading world prosperity for over 50 years now. It is not an empire like that of the Romans or the British with imperial control or colonization; it is an empire of loosely-knit trade and security arrangements (NATO, ASEAN, NAFTA) between sovereign states that have proved beneficial for all involved. Buchanan uses rhetoric to paint the United States in the colors of past more heavy-handed empires, but historical analogy does not mesh with 21st century reality. The world is a smaller place everyday, and you cannot simply push it away. As John McCain said recently in criticism of Buchanan and his neo-isolationism, " Pat Buchanan, a brawler in college, but who did not serve in the military. John McCain, of navy royalty, saying he should go. I can see Buchanan questioning whether it was wise to stand up to Nazi Germany being countered by Bob Dole, claiming that the serious wound suffered fighting Nazi Germany and which resulted in his loss of the use of his left arm was well worth the loss. Let us examine Buchanan against his chief opponents in the Republican Party. There is McCain and his six years being tortured by the North Vietnamese in the Hanoi Hilton and still staying loyal to his officer's oath, followed by years of service in the senate. I see Dole and his 50 years of service in the senate, after his WWII service and near-fatal wound. And then I see Buchanan, who has never been elected to office once and has made a career out of being a blowhard, and I see all I need to see. George W. Bush, Jr. at least served in the Texas National Guard as a pilot. Buchanan had merely made the rounds of Washington cocktail parties and speechified ad nauseam. A man is validated or not as much by his life's work as by his "ideas." As Ralph Waldo Emerson has said, "What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say." My father, a conservative Republican who should be his target audience, heard Buchanan speak in person in Washington D.C. and found him to be repellant.
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