Interview: Buchanan Endorses Bush

In his latest book "Where the Right Went Wrong" (Thomas Dunne Books), Pat Buchanan provides a sweeping assessment of America's problems, foreign and domestic and he lays out his vision of what needs to be done to successfully fight terrorism abroad and prevent America from becoming a third world nation economically.

In an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com, Pat tackled some of the most controversial issues America faces and spelled out his solutions in his usual courageous and straight forward manner.

Pat has endorsed President Bush for re-election. He told NewsMax.com why he is backing a president many of whose policies he has vigorously opposed.

Pat: I think Bush is good on judges, he's good on taxes, he's good on values and he's good on sovereignty. We cannot have John Kerry picking Supreme Court justices or the next Chief Justice of the United States. The fundamental home of conservatism is the Republican Party and we cannot cede that party to the neoconservatives who have hijacked it. The right approach is now that their policies have failed and are perceived to have failed is to step in and take the party back.

Pat: The president has to be a reflective man. He has to see the disaster that Iraq has become. He will have to look at the people who have failed him; who gave him the wrong advice, who gave him the falsified evidence and did not prepare for the aftermath of victory. I think there will be some changes made. I think that the whole Iraq episode has discredited neo-conservatism as has the continued loss of manufacturing jobs abroad and the invasion across our southern border and these monstrous deficits. If the president loses the election it will be because he embraced these neoconservative ideas. I have to believe there are men around him including his father who know what went wrong and who will counsel him what to do right.

That's the first goal. Secondly, the battle for the succession will begin almost as soon as this election ends. True conservatives have to find themselves a candidate to support in 2008.

Pat: I don't see how we have any other choice than to stick with Bush. In a choice between Kerry and Bush, who would be better for the country? Despite the mistakes of the Bush administration, we have to go with the president.

NM: Did the neoconservatives drag Bush into their corner on domestic policy or was he there to begin with?

Pat: That's a good point. The neoconservatives are much more decisive in terms of foreign policy which is what they really care about, especially Middle Eastern policy and U.S. policy toward the Arab and Islamic world. On big government conservatism however they certainly joined hands with President Bush and they provided him with an intellectual rationale and editorial support - and commentary and printed support for big government conservatism which is a contradiction in terms. I think even there the chickens are coming home to roost.

Pat: As I write in my chapter about China there are two views about China - one is precisely as you stated it - that the rapid industrialization and the tremendous burst in economic growth in China - 9 and 10 percent a year - will rapidly create the kind of middle class which will demand political reform and will put an end to the monopoly of power by the Communist party. That's one hope.

On the other hand, there is the possibility that a rapidly growing and expanding industrializing China will begin to use its weight and power to assert some of it's old Chinese policies of attaining hegemony over East Asia and seeking world domination itself - to become the dominant power in the world and to begin by reincorporating Taiwan, forcibly if necessary which could bring them into a direct confrontation with the United States. This is an area where the next president should sit down with his National Security Council for several nights and review exactly where we are going with China and whether a policy of building China up, which we now have with our $150 billion trade surplus we give them every year - Whether this is in the national interest of the United States.

Pat: Free trade is de-industrializing America. It's not really free trade that's going on. What's taking place is a transfer of our economic base - our industrial base - out of the United States into the third world and in particular into China. We are not shipping goods to China so much as we are shipping factories and plants and technology and jobs. It's not true to say that the president has not created jobs since his administration began - He's created tens of millions of jobs - in China.

Pat: The possibility is growing since both political parties see this loss of manufacturing jobs as a kind of issue that can swing battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan and West Virginia and even the Carolinas. The prospects for a revival of authentic conservatism have never been better since 9/11 for the simple reason that neoconservatism has conspicuously and blatantly failed. This is why the president is in trouble because the neoconservative policies he has embraced have damaged this country.

NM: what do you see in the possibility of re-industrializing this country, especially in terms of manufacturing?

Pat: It would be a long-term project but I think it could be done relatively simply. First withdrawing from the World Trade Organization. Secondly, by beginning to impose tariffs on imported manufacturers and using every dollar of the revenues from those tariffs to cut taxes on manufacturing in the Unites States so that eventually you've raised the cost of companies moving abroad to sell back into the United States, and you've increased the incentives for foreign companies as well as American companies to put their plants and parts factories right here in the United States. White collar outsourcing via the internet is a much more difficult problem. I have not yet thought through a solution to that. And you cannot control the international flow of money but you can to some extent if you are dealing with industries and manufacturing - that's a soluble problem.

Pat: I agree with the president's policy as he proceeded all the way from 9/11 up until he declared that we are going after the Axis of Evil. What you do with Islamic terrorism is that you isolate the terrorists from the sea in which they swim which is the Islamic world and the Arab world by working with Arab governments and Arab nations that do not support the terrorists. The president did a good thing in disarming Libya of weapons of mass destruction. That's the right approach. Even working with Iran in Afghanistan was the right approach. What you don't want is a policy of confrontation with the entire Arab world or a policy of preventive wars to invade Arab countries to rearrange their internal affairs. That will simply turn the entire Arab and Islamic world against you and convert prospective allies into allies of Osama bin Laden which is exactly what has happened in Iraq.

Pat: I agree with you. I'm very hopeful that the president has come to see that the causes of this spreading and burgeoning insurrection - that the principal cause is the presence of an American imperial power in Iraq trying to dictate to them what kind of government they're going to have, what kind of society, what kind of foreign policy. All Iraqis are up in arms over that.

What we want to do is separate Iraqi nationalism from this Islamic fundamentalism which has married itself to Iraqi nationalism in waging war against us. I think Mr. Alawi is moving the right way in that. I have no use for this Muqtada al-Sadr but there's no evidence he was an enemy of the United States until we arrived in that country. I would like to see his Shiia forces unleashed against the Sunni Muslim Islamists who they don't want running the country any more than we do.

Pat: I think as the United States withdraws its own forces and indicates we are going to withdraw them, that the Iraqi people are going to see that if you object to the American presence here understand that the real problem in terms of the long term future of Iraq is not going to be the Americans, it's going to be the internal struggle for power and whether or not the Iraqi people want to be ruled by an Islamist fundamentalist regime and I don't think they do - certainly not in the Sunni sector and not in the Shiia sector or the Kurdish sector.

I think that what we've got to do is withdraw ourselves as a unifying adversary for these forces so that they will divide and fight among themselves.

NM: How do you deal with that considering the enormous influence Israel has over American foreign policy?

Pat: In many cases the national interests of America and Israel are in concert. But in some cases they are in flat contradiction and disagreement, and in those cases we must support a foreign policy that is in the interest of the United States whether Ariel Sharon likes it or not.

Quite frankly, the Palestinians have been brutally treated and mistreated and they have been dispossessed of their land and denied their rights and they have been persecuted, and the United States should not support a policy of Israeli annexation of Palestinian lands. We should say that the Israelis have a right to build a fence on their own land to secure themselves but they have no right to build a fence on Palestinian land, that the West bank settlements remain illegal and that the Palestinians have a right to their homeland and a state of their own with its capital in Arab East Jerusalem. If that offends Mr. Sharon it offends him. It seems to me that that is a policy that is consistent both with the U.S. national interest and with the interests of justice. Where there is no justice there will be no peace. We cannot tolerate a situation where nightly TV shows Israeli troops using American weapons to shoot down Palestinians who are fighting fundamentally - many of them - for their own legitimate rights.

NM: Have conservatives made the case that the issue of judicial activism could be a winning one for them?

Pat: It is a tremendous issue and the American people agree with us. My point and the point of conservatives is very simple: in all these conflicts in the cultural war the issues should be decided by the people through their elected representatives, in state legislatures and state gubernatorial offices and in congress and in the presidency. But the Supreme Court has seized and usurped powers away from the legislatures and the legislatures have failed to use their powers to retrieve what rightfully belongs to them. That's why in my chapter "Congressional Abdication and the Rise of Judicial Dictatorship' I argue for Congress to impose strict restrictions upon the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and all federal courts.

At the state level we need courageous legislators and governors who will defy state court decisions which are inconsistent with the state constitutions. We need to wage peaceful and constitutional war to win back powers that have been usurped unconstitutionally by judges and justices. The failure of conservatives and Republicans to do this is an abject surrender of their responsibility and duty.

NM: You paint a pretty dismal picture of the country heading towards third world status. Do you feel that this is inevitable or do you think the trend can be stopped?

Pat: I'm a long-term pessimist about the country. This is a wonderful country, a great country but we have educated a couple of generations very badly - they don't appreciate what we had. We've got tremendous weakness in national politics in both parties. We have blindness as to what is happening to this country when you've got a massive invasion taking place in the southwest and no one has the courage to stop it and everyone is terrified of being called a name if they take a stance against our Israeli policies or our immigration policy or our trade policy. No one wants to be called a protectionist - so it's very hard be optimistic in the long run. The country resembles 4th century Rome. I'm fearful of what's going to happen, and many young people seem oblivious to what's coming and what they are going to lose. It's not going to be all sweetness and light if they lose this last best hope of earth.

If Bush had followed Buchanan's counsel he would coasting to a 40+ state, 400+ electoral vote, 60% of the vote landslide. It is amazing that so many so called conservatives recoil in horror at protectionism, when tariffs were the method the founding fathers chose to finance government spending limited by constitutional constraints.

It was democrats intent on expanding the size of government who jettisoned the protective tariff. Up until Woodrow Wilson tariffs and excise taxed provided 90% of federal revenue. These will limit the government to 3 or 4% of GDP, for the government to take 20% you need an income tax.

It is the neo-conservatives who are the broken clock.

P.S. just a thought, can you blame Saddam for gassing his own people? I'd like to gas them too.

If Bush had followed Buchanan's counsel he would coasting to a 40+ state, 400+ electoral vote, 60% of the vote landslide.

Like the incredible 40+ state landslide that Buchanan coasted to. I must have slept through his Presidency. Oh, wait dark forces (Jooz) kept him out of the Presidency. It was the 40+ state landslide he garnered among Republican voters. I slept through those primaries, I guess.

It is amazing that so many so called conservatives recoil in horror at protectionism, when tariffs were the method the founding fathers chose to finance government spending limited by constitutional constraints.

Conservatives (so-called or otherwise) recoil at protectionism because it makes no economic sense. If Japanese taxpayers want to subsidize America by paying our car payments, so be it. Ditto Chinese manufactured goods. Ditto Asian support for our dollar. As for the "historical note," it's a non sequitur. The founders chose tariffs because they had no other means.

It is the neo-conservatives who are the broken clock.

Free trade predates neoconservatism. Buchanan has been spouting the claim that Americans should prop-up the ILGWU and other Socialist causes for years.

P.S. just a thought, can you blame Saddam for gassing his own people? I'd like to gas them too.

I'll let that statement speak for itself. (My own answer to that is "no.")

Who are the "neoconservatives"? Are they a philosophically cohesive group? Are they the followers of conservative master? Members of a connected group of think tanks?

No. "Neoconservatives" to Buchanan are simply the "new conservatives" who got promoted over him in the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

Buchanan's "new conservatives" are all of the consultants, speech writers, advisers and White House employees who got the jobs he would loved to have had. They are the "new" people who shoved him out of the way. It has nothing to do with their philosophy, simply professional jealousy

And the biggest most evil "new conservative" of then all to Buchanan is George W. Bush who he called "that Bush boy" who was "picked by them" to be "anointed" the Republican Presidential nominee in 2000, when it was actually Buchanan's "turn" to be the nominee.

Buchanan had faithfully waited his turn but was denied his entitlement by some "newbies" who didn't understand or appreciate the great historical struggle that he and his companions had been engaged in to save America from "those persons" who were rapidly destroying American culture and our traditional way of life.

His attempt now to catch a train that has already left the station is part of his plan to run his surrogate, Tom Tancredo for president in 2008.

Nixon and Reagan both had Buchanan in their administrations both won reelection by a landslide, Ford and Bush 41 did not, they lost reelection. America is now running a trade deficit at 6% of GDP and rising, edging in on the peacetime record set by Italy in 1923.

The only support for the dollar now are the central banks of Japan and China, but it is on shaky ground. The chi-coms or someone like George Soros could conceivably cause a run on the dollar now. The trade deficits will crash the value of the dollar, in fact much of the sunup in the price of oil is due to the weakness of the dollar right now. Plus the chi-coms bidding up the price of oil with the dollars earned from selling "Chinese manufactured goods" to America.

I fail to see how spending more than you earn is a good conservative value. Say I financed a $30,000 auto I could not afford by trading away 15% of a $200,000 house, got something for nothing? TANSTAAFL, in 10 years the house may appreciate to say $300,000 (with the 15% traded away being worth $45,000) while the car depreciated to $15,000. So I would have traded away $45,000 for $15,000.

Maybe that sounds good to neo-conservatives like Bill Bennett, committed free trade whose idea of good economic sense is to gamble away millions of dollars in casino's. My grandfather told me "never trade away something that appreciates for something that depreciates, that's the road to the poorhouse." He was a conservative way back when the conservatives were disciples of Trotsky!

Free trade predates neoconservatism...
***
Yep. It hollowed out the British Empire; now it will weaken America's economy. It helps the poor nations and drains the powerful economies.

When enough Americans get sick of being screwed they will vote in radical lefties like Obama, and they will confiscate your paycheck AND wealth. making this whole exercise self-defeating.

Ten years from now, maybe less, reality will set in at what irreversible damage has occurred. Third worlders outside your gates, and no money in their pockets to buy your products. Democrats/Labor will be voted into power I'm sad to say.

Current ecomonic policy is undisciplined, foolish, and profligate.

Amen brother, I'm afraid that if we continue on the present path we should drop the bald eagle as our national symbol. A more fitting symbol will be the guy who gets traded around the cell block for Marlboro's. Illegal aliens in one end, chi-com crap in the other.

I get a kick out of all these bumper sticker patriots who whine about France, but would pitch a fit if a tariff were placed on French wines or Airbus jets. Old bumper sticker patriot limits his patriotism to a "Support our Troops" bumper sticker on his Hyundai (it made good economic sense to buy from the land where our troops are spit on, rather than from the USA where the very troops they purport to support may have a future job).

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.