Leave it to Pat Buchanan to mix the best and the worst of political analysis.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Is it just me, or is he deconstructing before our eyes? I’m blessed with no access to CNN, Faux News, or any other cable channels, so don’t get to see too many bobble-headed babblers these days. No loss. They don’t even see the changes coming.
We’re watching the crumbling of the old guard institutional structures of both parties, along with their pet pundits.
I’ve looked through it briefly .and I have to look through it again since im so tired my brain’s addled but he probably ISNT deconstructing. He’s a wierd beast known as a conservative Catholic. If you watch the talking heads on Sunday you will notice a simular pattern in McLaughlin (another Jesuit trained pundit) whereby he’s antiwar, thus anti-Bush, but fairly conservative on other grounds like abortion,gay rights, etc. I don’t know exactly what McLaughflin’s views are but both Buchanan and ML can sure take you back from tiem to time because you expect them to be “toe the line” front line conservatives and they -aren’t- !
He is also a populist with a true ear for what bothers folk. If he were able to construct alliances better he probably would be a formidable politician. But as it is he has a tin ear where other powers-that-be reside except for his TV shows.
Don’t worry about Faux: They’re busy trying to tie the riots in France to Al-Quaeda.
I am curious to hear what you take exception to in his column, I found he was quite damning in his critique and didn’t find the ambiquities I usually see in his words. So please point me to what I have missed.
take a while. His insistence that Ronald Reagan was a fiscal conservative is just bad history. His demonization of immigrants is flat racist. His lament of our loss of national character is code for his anti-secularism, and his racism.
And yet, the vast majority of his critique is spot on. That is what makes it so interesting.
unlike MOST Republicans, Buchanan’s brain is at least partially functional?
I guess I’m not old or historically versed enough to understand the comparison of Bill Clinton and Goldwater. All I know about Goldwater is that at one point he actually suggested that the USA should drop its policy of no first use of nuclear weapons (does that sound familiar–and I don’t mean Clinton???) and that he had a science scholarship named after him, which I happened to win, despite feeling sort of embarassed given the stuff about nukes.
If I had to guess, I would say that what Buchanan is getting at is that Clinton looks more like a paleocon than W right now, but I’m not really sure.
Yep, that’s what I think he means. I am old enough to remember Goldwater’s run for president. (I was in HS). My impression – though it could be warped by the fact that this was happening in the early years of my political awareness, is that before Goldwater, the national conversation and conventional wisdom, or whatever – was between REPUBLICANS and DEMOCRATS. There were also, “conservatives” and “liberals,” of course, but that distinction wasn’t focused on so much by the average person. Republicans were assumed to conservative and democrats liberal, but the main discussion was about what the Republicans were proposing vs. what the Democrats were.
By the Kennedy years, Conservative and Liberal as such were starting to be a topic of debate more often. (See JFK on liberalism.)
But with Reagan’s famous TV address in support of Goldwater in 1964 (I actually listened to this live on the radio – I still remember it clearly – I was ironing in the kitchen . . . ) the conversation shifted. Now it was CONSERVATIVES vs. LIBERALS. Listen to it here, or read it here. (I recommend listening to understand why it left such an impression. Conservatives still refer to it as “The Speech.”)
Goldwater led the charge for what Buchanan thinks of as Real Conservativism, which then reached its apotheosis during the Reagan presidency. That is, Reagan is God.
Buchanan is saying (I think) that GW has strayed so far from the True Conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan, that Clinton – with balanced budgets and no major foreign wars during his terms – looks like Goldwater by comparison.
He lost me at “abandonment of Reaganism.” I couldn’t go further. The very idea that Reagan was some paragon of conservatism is just disgusting. I can’t go there. Let’s see, Reagan got into the WH by having his VP candidate (Bush I) cut a deal with the Iranians to make Carter look bad. Cute. Real patriotic. Then we’ve got the extended Iran-Contra drugs and guns mess.
Bush II is an extrapolation of Reaganism, the logical extention of Reaganism, the hey-deficits-don’t-matter fullfillment of Reaganism, the piss on the little guys trickle-down deluge of Reaganism.
By this so-called abandonment is Buchanan really saying Bush II has failed the charisma/bamboozle standard set by Reagan’s hollow, senile aw-shucks ability to charm and manipulate the populus? Yeah, that’s it; Bush is just not as good at being a sock puppet as Reagan was. He keeps fumbling his script and his egomania keeps peeping out. Or no, maybe, it’s all Laura’s fault; she just not as good at being a Mommy as Nancy was.
The deification of Reagan makes me sick; heck, I left the country when he got re-elected. I was too young and hopeful to abandon ship when Nixon got re-elected. Now I’m too old and poor to bail out.
The only thing that worries me more than thinking Buchanan is a nut are the occassions when I find myself agreeing with him. Thankfully, this isn’t one of those weird moments.
I agree with you about Reagan – I didn’t think I would ever actually hate a president of the US as much as I did Reagan . . . until GWB came along.
Buchanan is living in a fantasy world with his Reagan-worship. He has an idea of what Reagan was all about – one shared passionately by many conservatives to this day, and this blinds them to all of the ways Reagan himself abandoned what he claimed to stand for.
Although I also despise what he claimed to stand for. I’d say – listen to The Speech (link above), because it is very educational. It explains a lot. But it’s not for the faint-hearted or the queasy.