I see at post 114 clintonh8r comments that it’s fashionable to bash Buchanan here on Free Republic. I have noticed the same thing, and it has puzzled me since much of what he says seems to makes sense. I always just know when I open a Pat Buchanan thread it will be laced with insults towards him.
That being said, devere, assuming you have some factual reasons to say what you’re saying here, you have finally put into plain English some noteworthy concerns about Pat Buchanan, his motives, and his biases, and those reasons help me to understand why we need to be very careful about accepting what he writes hook line and sinker. If PBuchanan has some hidden agenda springing from Jew-hatred and pro-Nazi sympathies then everything he writes is suspect. Maybe that’s why so many FReepers make what at first glance seem to be undeserved derogatory comments on Buchanan threads. THANK YOU SO MUCH, devere, for bothering to explain it and clearing up this puzzle for me rather than just making brief nonsensical snide comments.
You said, QUOTE:
Pat Buchanan is a very intelligent man who has long-since discredited himself with his reflexive Jew-hatred and pro-NAZI sympathies. As I recall it was Pat, as a Reagan aid, who scheduled the President to lay a wreath on SS graves at Bitburg, Germany.
END QUOTE
To honor your most reasonable request, I have done some further study, and come up with the following:
In 1990 William F. Buckley reviewed Pat Buchanan’s record in a lengthy National Review article, and concluded that he was an anti-Semite. Many years later, I believe that Buckley softened that appraisal of Buchanan to an Ann-Coulter-style-provocateur.
William Safire, Pat’s speech-writing colleague in the Nixon Adminitration, appraised Pat as a 4 to 5 on the anti-semitism scale, where Farrakhan is a 7 and Hitler a 10.
For me Pat’s most peculiar episode was his insistence that Desert Storm ( the war to liberate Kuwait ) was due to Jewish influence, saying “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East-the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States” ( quite bizarre, since the Saudis invited us in, and the American people were overwhelmingly in favor of liberating Kuwait ).
Opposition to a US alliance with Israel, per se, does not make anyone an anti-semite. In Pat’s case, however, he does seem to have a major chip on his shoulder toward the Jews and Israel. He has at times been spoiling for a verbal quarrel, even to the point of making preposterous claims, such as noted above.
And then there’s Pat’s self-appointed role as defender of many accused NAZIs; which in my opinion is a strange hobby for a would-be statesman ( I wish he would spend half that energy trying to free Compean and Ramos ). Out of that advocacy role also came some peculiar statements from Pat about the details of the NAZI murder factories, that have been interpreted by many as Holocaust revisionism.
Here is a lengthy article by Joshua Muravchik on Pat Buchanan’s accused-NAZI defense activities:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n23_v45/ai_14753228
One naturally wonders why a man of Buchanan’s success and eminence behaved like this. It was surely not out of any calculation of self-interest. I assume that he was expressing his deeply held convictions.
I’ve read up a bit more on Bitburg in the past couple of days, and it now seems to me that there is no proof that Buchanan was the instigator of that visit. It seems more likely that he was blamed in various ways for that Reagan Adminitration foul-up because of his past reputation for anti-semitism.
Here’s one rather complete representation of Pat’s history. I’d caution that the editor seems to me to be a Liberal Democrat, but most of the facts cited seem solid:
http://www.realchange.org/buchanan.htm
My overall impression remains that Pat Buchanan is an anti-semite. He’s probably not a particularly virulent one, but he’s made a point of being outspoken about it. FDR and Nixon were perhaps just as anti-semitic as Pat, but they did a much better job of keeping it private.
It’s also my opinion that Pat Buchanan is a brilliant man, whose writings are always worth reading, albeit with a proper sense of skepticism. If not for his unfortunate “ethnic preoccupations”, he would rightly be considered a potential President. That is why I consider him a tragic figure, although I doubt that he would agree with my point of view.