Patrick Buchanan

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Pat Buchanan, 2008.
One of the

Pundits

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And a dirty dozen more
Patrick Buchanan BuKKKanan (b. 1938) is a noted paleoconservative, antisemite, and racist who ran for the Republican nomination for president of the United States a few times. He began his career in politics working for Nixon, and went on to work for Ford and Reagan as well as an advisor. He then built himself up as something of a pundit and built something of a second career out of the newly-opening venue of cable news. Beginning with the television show Buchanan-Braden in 1982, he became a rotating talking head for CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. He seemed reasonable but kooky until February 2012, when enough of his colleagues got fed up with his racism and gave him the boot.[1]

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[edit] Political career

The first time he ran for president himself, in 1992, he challenged George H. W. Bush for the Republican party nomination, and after he failed, he gave a speech at the convention that hit every single culture war target. In fact, he was the one of the first to use the phrase "culture war" in that very speech. Many have suggested that the speech he gave so frightened moderate Republicans that they swung to either Perot or Clinton.

In his second run for the Republican nomination in 1996, he managed to eke out a victory in the New Hampshire primary along with three other early contests. This gave the Republican establishment a brief scare but Bob Dole easily steamrolled him in "Super Tuesday."

His third run was on Ross Perot's Reform Party ticket in 2000. There was much controversy over his run, as many said he essentially took over the party in a coup, lured by the prospect of $12 million in federal matching funds, then left the party in a shambles. He did very poorly, though the design of the "butterfly ballot" ended up giving him quite a lot of votes in certain liberal, predominantly Jewish precincts in Florida. He was willing to acknowledge that those votes were not likely for him, especially given that he is seen as very anti-Semitic.

[edit] Views

He is most noted today for his opposition to free trade and immigration, both legal and illegal.[2] He could easily be considered an "economic nationalist", but his anti-immigration policies make it seem more likely he is just xenophobic. He worked as a political commentator on MSNBC, despite both all of the racist, horrible things he has said publicly and the station's well known "liberal" image.[3] Though they eventually fired him.[4]

He is, along with Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, and a handful of other people, among the only categorical anti-war voices since the end of the Cold War. (As opposed to people like, for example, Howard Dean who was only against the second Iraq War but supported the first, John Kerry who was against the first and for the second, and Pat Robertson who was only against the NATO bombing of Serbia but supported bombing everyone else.) Buchanan's rationale, of course, is that American lives are much too precious to be wasted on those nasty foreigners.

Of course, this is because Buchanan describes himself as a neo-isolationist. By this, he does not mean that the US should not involve itself in other people's disputes, rather, he seems to believe that the US government should have no foreign policy period. That means no UN, no NATO, no NORAD, etc. He crystallized his views in his recent book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War wherein he basically takes a pro-German view of World Wars I and II, says that the US shouldn't have gotten involved in World War II, that Churchill helped provoke Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and that Hitler could have been contained.[5]

Especially since Russia's law against "gay propaganda", he has become a frequent apologist for Vladimir Putin.[6] Following the Russian annexation of Crimea, Buchanan declared that God was on Russia's side and "the West is Gomorrah."[7]

[edit] Torture

Despite being against the "War on Terror", he has supported the use of torture on potentially innocent people suspected of terrorism.[8]

[edit] Anti-Semitism

Despite himself denying it, Buchanan has been accused of anitsemitism by the Anti-Defamation League,[9], Charles Krauthammer,[10] and William F. Buckley[11] for his apologetics for Nazi war crimes[12] and Holocaust diminution.[13] That and the fact that he dislikes Jews.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/pat-buchanan-booted-msnbc-months-suspended-controversial-book-article-1.1024404
  2. This has given him some VERY unlikely bedfellows, such as when future Socialist Party USA candidate Brian Moore endorsed him in 2000.
  3. Although it's likely that MSNBC kept him around for precisely this reason, in the hopes that he'd say something embarrassingly bigoted and make the right look bad. He also provided them with a convenient right-wing straw man, kind of like how Fox News kept around pet "liberals" like Alan Colmes in order to have easy targets to tear down. See: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
  4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17079971
  5. http://www.newsweek.com/id/141501/output/print
  6. http://buchanan.org/blog/putin-one-us-6071
  7. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/vladimir-putin-christian-crusader/
  8. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31437
  9. ADL:Patrick Buchanan: Unrepentant Bigot
  10. Salon:Who's afraid of Pat Buchanan?
  11. The New York Times:The Enmity Within
  12. Pat Buchanan: Hitler apologist
  13. On Pat Buchanan’s Holocaust denial>
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