[lbo-talk] Re: pat buchanan

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Thu May 20 05:00:23 PDT 2004



>From: frank scott <frank at marin.cc.ca.us>
>
>"Pat Buchanan was making a lot of sense recently. Now he's gone back to
>
>being Pat Buchanan."
>
>he's pretty consistent...this doesn't seem any departure from his
>stance on issues...maybe some people just pick and choose, since his
>populism is, very often, close to the views of people who normally think
>him a demon...but they are of a pretty consistent political economic
>philosophy...

[Buchanan had been doing a pretty good peacenik imitation recently, but he has really changed his tune. Max Sawicky wrote of this on his blog yesterday:]

STICK A FORK IN PAT

Caught Joe Scarborough last night. He did a segment on the progress in Iraq, then on conservative discord over the course of the war. ...

On the conservative crack-up, the guests were Andy and Pat Buchanan. They were both pretty good, each in their own way. Andy said problems need to be openly discussed, mistakes admitted. The campaign is salvageable. Plausible, if wrong.

Pat was much more amazing. After writing columns for months about the errancy of the invasion, and maintaining now that it was a mistake, Pat said Bush needs to straighten up and fly right: be honest about the cost of bringing off the occupation, and adding the hundreds of thousands of troops and billions of dollars necessary. He emphasized that a failure in Iraq would mean a meltdown of the Republicans, true enough, but this leads him to urge the Administration to double down. In other words, Bush's political survival is more important than a U.S. debacle in Iraq.

I've always said, as a populist, even as a right-wing populist, Buchanan has always been a complete phony. He is not a serious anti-war person. He was never a serious critic of trade, since he never had any constructive remedies. He is not a serious third party person, since he wrecked the only viable third party the U.S. has had since, what, the Socialist Party before WWI?

Pat is just another court jester, a placeholder to reflect some safe diversity in opinion.

<http://www.maxspeak.org/mt/>

Carl

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