Let's not exaggerate here. Pat's off base on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he's hardly "celebrating" or defending imperial Japan. He's just claiming Truman used more force than necessary to defeat them. I agree he's wrong on this, but how is it anti-American?
Regarding Hitler, Pat never celebrated nor defended him. You are swallowing whole a lie the left has been propagating since 1977. The "great courage" line comes from his 1977 column, "A lesson in Tyranny too soon forgotten." Here's a link.
Anyone who reads this can plainly see Pat is not celebrating or defending Hitler. He's just trying to show how so many respectable people of Hitler's time were unable to recognize the threat Hitler posed, and Pat compares them to people who fail to recognize the threat Communism posed back in 1977. Like Hitler, Communists appealed to principles of self-determination and the like to justify their aims, and some useful idiots were falling for it. Pat was trying to set them straight.
The "great courage" line is a reference to Hitler's valor in WW1, which, among other things, allowed him to put the wool over the eyes of many.
That is patently pansyish and anti-American. He suggesting that we ought to have operated in the Pacific at the pleasure of Japanese militarists. Japan's oil? Come now. It's not their oil till they take possession of it. Roosevelt, in one of his rare lucid foreign policy moments, tried to cripple Japan's war machine, at a time when their claws had already extended far past their own borders or even any conceivably justifiable buffer zone.
With regard to the courage comment, I may have been off base. But Pat is clearly taking the anti-American line trumpeted by so many Japanese history professors when he speaks of WWII.