Pat "Bum Knee" Buchanan on Imus today...
I'm not one of those hapless specimens who has a secret high opinion of Pat Buchanan. I think the reason Pat gets a fair hearing from some on the left is mute testimony to how beaten down the progressives and radicals have gotten over the years.
To me, he is still the same grinning authoritarian yanker he's always been. If the purpose of the conservative movement is to pull the right ever rightward then standing on the extreme of their line is Pat Buchanan who can see the left's positions from his vantage point.
That doesn't make him anyone's friend or secret ally no matter how much he SOUNDS like an orthodox hard leftwinger.
Back in the old nuclear freeze days, Pat would've cheerfully unleashed tanks and armored cars on demonstrators no matter how peaceful the protest.
To Pat, peaceful and nonviolent opposition is naught but a heaven sent opportunity to bust heads among those least inclined to fight back.
He is that kind of a guy, going back to his halcyon days as a street corner bully in Washington D.C. with two alleged assaults on police officers on his rapsheet.
Pat's appearance on Imus was the usual snarled bluster interspersed with odd bouts of giggling, he's called the notional upcoming Iraq War as both a reach for empire and a sop to Israel. He has nothing but contempt for neocons . However his solution is classical bullying in action. As President he claims he'd send Richard Armitage over to Baghdad with a long list of gruesome threats to force Saddam to toe the line.
Which is different from Bush's current policy in what way?
Well nothing except Bush seems willing to hazard American Lives and Treasure on backing his threats up...
So it doesn't really sound like Pat differs all that much from George, it's just Buchanan wouldn't be doing it for Israel per se.
Well let us be charitable, it's hard for cartoonishly truculent people like Pat and George to NOT wallow in bellicosity...we shouldn't begrudge them their inability to reconcile the details.
In other words, Pat is willing to go to war, just not on behalf of Israel...whereas Bush will take his justifications where he can find them.
To me, there is not a dime's worth of difference between the two men's views to paraphrase the late George Wallace.
Credit Pat with one notion though, he realized early on that Mao had it wrong, power does not proceed from the barrel of a gun; it issues out from a teevee set. He is the first of a new breed that combines DC insider pundit elite politics with mass electoral politics. Others will pick up his mantle in due course and run for high office on the same mix of simpleminded nonsense, purged of Pat's ethnic hang-ups but just as detrimental to democracy on the long run.
So remember that the next time someone opines "I don't agree with Pat Buchanan but..."