Pat Buchanan's Fantasy of... His Own Private Idaho?

Pat Buchanan, after describing how nations that had been part of the USSR reclaimed their national identities, and in some cases balkanized afterward, and carrying on for a bit about various secessionist movements in Europe, conflates the secession of a region to create a new, independent nation state with the redrawing of political boundaries within a nation state.

What are the forces pulling nations apart? Ethnicity, culture, history and language—but now also economics. And separatist and secessionist movements are cropping up here in the United States.

While many Red State Americans are moving away from Blue State America, seeking kindred souls among whom to live, those who love where they live but not those who rule them are seeking to secede.

Buchanan appears to be conceding that the primary driving forces behind these secessionist movements, foreign and domestic, are ethnicity and culture. In the context of ending a civil war between ethnic groups with the bloody partitioning of a country, it's not really surprising that ethnicity and culture play a role in that division - it's to be expected. But there are no similar crises within the United States. Buchanan may be correct that the citizens of the regions he describes later in his editorial are concerned about protecting their ethnicity and culture, but perhaps the real problem is that they're too resistant to getting on board with the proverbial "great American melting pot".

The five counties of Western Maryland—Garrett, Allegheny, Washington, Frederick, and Carroll, which have more in common with West Virginia and wish to be rid of Baltimore and free of Annapolis, are talking secession.

I found Ilya Somin's "vote with your feet" concept to be a bit ridiculous, but I have to say Buchanan's idea is far more precious. Why move across a nearby state line when you can instead move the state line? Buchanan has given no apparent thought to the permanence of such an arrangement. Does he anticipate that states will trade counties like kids trade baseball cards? (Perhaps I should say Yu-Gi-Oh? Kids, it seems, have their own cultural secessionist movements every decade or so.) Perhaps he imagines a context in which any number of people who claim to be disgruntled with their state government can split off and form their own state? Could I be my own state, and perhaps serve as both senators?

Buchanan has something dead wrong in his earlier secessionist argument, suggesting that economics are now driving European secessionist movements. To the contrary, economics tend to hold back peaceful secession. When you live in a small, rural area you gain considerable advantage by being associated with a larger, more economically developed state. Such regions usually receive massive subsidies from their states, sometimes direct, and often in the form of government enterprises that exist only by virtue of state funding. Buchanan states,

Folks on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, bordered by Wisconsin and the Great Lakes, which is connected to lower Michigan by a bridge, have long dreamed of a separate state called Superior. The UP has little in common with Lansing and nothing with Detroit.

I'm not sure what Buchanan means by "The UP has little in common with Lansing", or if he even knows what he means. Or Detroit, for that matter, unless it's as basic as "skin color". Economically, many parts of the UP are quite comparable to Detroit. Baraga County in the Upper Peninsula has an 18.3% unemployment rate - comparable to Detroit's. Dependence upon public assistance is high. What keeps the UP's unemployment rate from being even higher? Six of the UPs fifteen counties are home to state penitentiaries, with the good-paying jobs that go along with them. The UP also benefits from the state's promotion of tourism, it's leading industry. A separate state of "Superior" would have to pay its own way, which may be part of why the most feverish part of the "long dream" of which Buchanan speaks broke in the 1970's. Also, given how easily Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow carried the UP, perhaps the political culture is not as removed from the rest of the state as Buchanan imagines. I wonder if Buchanan even knows about the Mackinac Bridge?

In any event, even if Buchanan's worst case scenario unfolds, and we have another G.W. Bush-type President or continued incompetent House leadership by the likes of John Boehner, such that "another Great Recession hits or our elites dragoon us into another imperial war", and we "hear more of such talk", so what? It's a pipe dream. Nothing is going to come of it. I guess it's a bit more peaceful than the violent, genuinely secessionist fantasies of some of Buchanan's more extreme peers, but let's face it: We're not going to allow small regions to form their own states, we're not going to give five sparsely populated counties of Maryland or nine similarly rural counties of Colorado statehood, along with a minimum of two U.S. Senators and three Members of Congress. And beyond the fantasy, counties that enjoy being heavily subsidized by their urban peers tend to wake up at some point to the reality of what their tax bills and public services would look like if they actually carried their own weight.

Rand Paul for... Unsuccessful Presidential Candidate!

Ross Douthat wants to turn Rand Paul into a mountain, but qualifies his statements to such a degree that it's clear he views the man as a molehill. One he would prefer to become an influence within the Republican Party, but a molehill nonetheless.

Officially, Paul’s filibuster was devoted to a specific question of executive power — whether there are any limits on the president’s authority to declare American citizens enemy combatants and deal out death to them. But anyone who listened (and listened, and listened) to his remarks, and put them in the context of his recent speeches and votes and bridge-building, recognized that he was after something bigger: a reorientation of conservative foreign policy thinking away from hair-trigger hawkishness and absolute deference to executive power.

Or they might see Rand as engaging in cynical grandstanding over an issue that, yes, he probably believes in - but in a manner that he knew would not amount to a hill of beans. He knew that his party was, in essence, using him to create headlines - ideally some negative press for the President, but also cover for their actual filibuster of the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the D.C. Circuit Court. As for listening to Rand Paul, did anybody actually do that? If they did, among other things, they would have heard him criticize President Obama over his skepticism of Lochner v. New York, a century-old case that held limits on the length of an employee's workday or week to be unconstitutional. Yes, a handful of libertarian scholars have made it their pet case, but it has largely been regarded as a bad decision (Robert Bork called it an "abomination) by legal scholars across the political spectrum. To put it another way... I refer you to Charles Pierce's 5 minute rule ("This rule states that, for five minutes, both the son and the father, Crazy Uncle Liberty (!), make perfect sense on many issues. At the 5:00:01 mark, however, the trolley inevitably departs the tracks.") Even if we assume that Paul sincerely wants to move the Republican Party in the direction of opposing military adventurism, hawkishness and deference to executive power - a deference they insisted be shown to G.W. Bush but are happy to permit Paul to question when the other party's guy is in charge - Douthat admits that his party is not at all inclined to follow:

And he’s exploited partisan incentives to bring his fellow Republicans around to his ideas, deliberately picking battles — from the Libya intervention to drone warfare — where a more restrained foreign policy vision doubles as a critique of the Obama White House. Those incentives, rather than an intellectual sea change on the right, explain why his filibuster enjoyed so much Republican support. (Most of the senators who gave him an assist were just looking for a chance to score points against a Democratic White House.)

Might? A gratuitous qualification. Once Rand was done with his song and dance, Brennan was promptly confirmed. But Douthat hopes more will come of Rand's display:

But if Paul hasn’t won the party over to his ideas, he’s clearly widened the space for intra-Republican debate. And if he runs for president in 2016, that debate will become more interesting than it’s been for many, many years.

Why, it would be like the race would have been in 2008 or 2012, had Ron Paul chosen to run. Oh... right. It might be fun to see Paul questioned about his more bizarre political positions, and his somewhat bizarre sense of history (e.g., that the Lochner decision was a strike against Jim Crow... perhaps even Douthat had stopped listening by that part of the filibuster), but I don't expect Rand to have any more influence on his party than Ron. He's an ambitious man, and he clearly wants to advance within the party, but while Douthat may believe it to be impressive that Rand's "two big interviews after his filibuster were with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh", to me that choice screams that the man understands that he's far from ready for primetime.

There’s a lesson here for his fellow Republican politicians — though that lesson is not, I repeat not, that they should all remake themselves as Paul-style libertarians.

Does Douthat truly believe that any Republicans are about to make that mistake? (Should I interject that, although Douthat appears to be unaware of it, Rand Paul does not view himself as a libertarian?)

Rather, the lesson of Paul’s ascent is that being a policy entrepreneur carries rewards as well as risks — and that if you know how to speak the language of the party’s base, it’s possible to be a different kind of Republican without forfeiting your conservative bona fides.

Nobody questions Pat Buchanan's "conservative bona fides", and he can still give speeches on a variety of subjects that are in the right language to fire up the Republican Party's base, but... that's not a formula for winning elections. Douthat's hanging his hopes on the wrong guy.

When All You See is Race, Perhaps Race is An Issue

Pat Buchanan recently made an observation most people would agree with:

If it had been a white teenager who was shot, and a 28-year-old black guy who shot him, the black guy would have been arrested.

So assert those demanding the arrest of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

And they may be right.

Unfortunately, he couldn't stop there. His continued argument could reasonably be summarized as, "But why get worked up about it?"

John Casey at The Non Sequitur points out that other mainstream pundits are, in essence, in Buchanan's camp, asserting some form of "relation[ship] between 'unarmed black teenager is shot under puzzling and racially charged circumstances' and 'black people shoot each other all of the time'". Will attempts to characterize the Trayvon Martin shooting as having "been forced into a particular narrative to make it a white-on-black". But unless you're cool with the idea that a black kid can be shot by a white guy, with people like George Will and Pat Buchanan lecturing that it's understandable because black men are so dangerous, and with Buchanan flat-out admitting the credibility of the argument that were the participants races reversed Zimmerman may well be in jail, you can't blame others for injecting race into the discussion.

People like Will and Buchanan should start by examining their own thesis: the idea that nobody cares about black-on-black crime. Via Jamelle Bouie, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a rebuttal to the notion that African American communities are complacent about or indifferent to black-on-black violence. Bouie observes,

In addition to highlighting the obvious truth that black people care about what happens in their neighborhoods, it’s also worth pointing out the degree to which “black-on black” is a stupid way to understand or contexualize crime. Implicit in the description is the idea that crime committed against blacks by blacks has a racial component—that victims are targeted on the basis of their blackness.

The truth is that crime has more to do with proximity and opportunity than anything else. If African Americans are more likely to be robbed, or injured, or killed by other African Americans, it’s because they tend to live in close proximity to each other. Like most people, criminals almost always take the path of least resistance—nine times out of ten, they’ll go for the easy target.

To put this another way, white Americans are most likely to be victims of other whites, but there’s no talk of a “white-on-white” crime epidemic. Not that this is a surprise, but typical, explainable behavior becomes “pathology” when observed in African Americans. That this still has currency is incredibly frustrating.

Pat Buchanan is a great case in point,

It is a country where white criminals choose black victims in 3 percent of their crimes, but black criminals choose white victims in 45 percent of their crimes.

Choose? We're principally talking about opportunistic crime, are we not? But that mindset makes it easier, I suppose, for people who aren't actually victims of crimes to "choose" the race of their make-believe attackers. What's the point of the Will-Buchanan exercise if not to justify treating all young black men as potential criminals, shoot first and check for Skittles later.

Here's something for Will and Buchanan to think about: In the other cases, nobody is claiming that no crime was committed. Nobody is suggesting that the victims deserved to be victimized by virtue of living in dangerous neighborhoods or having the wrong color of skin. Okay, so the clothing argument sometimes does come up if the victim is a woman, but... come on.

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"Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to wear hoodies...."

Pat Buchanan complains that civil rights leaders are upset about the Trayvon Martin shooting, and hypothesizes that they would be silent had the races of the shooter and victim been reversed. That's quite possible because, oddly enough, people who focus their attention on civil rights issues tend to speak out on cases that implicate civil rights issues. By way of comparison, you could take a certain Irish Catholic commentator and note that he doesn't spend much time railing about the war on Ramadan or the unfair treatment of Muslims by the media, but if the topic turns to Christmas, away we go.... And yes, even if we weren't talking about a police agency with a spotty history on issues of race, the failure to adequately investigate the shooting of a young black man by anybody is likely to raise the hackles of civil rights leaders, perhaps especially those who lived through the 1950's and 1960's.

You would think we could establish at least this much common ground: Whatever else you think, it is appalling that a teenager ended up being targeted and shot because he was wearing a hoodie with the hood up on a rainy day, and doing absolutely nothing that was illegal or otherwise suspicious. It is appalling that people within the police department responsible for the investigation leaked irrelevant material about Martin in order to discredit him. It is appalling how eagerly some people grasp at any sign of trouble in Martin's background - none of which factored into Zimmerman's choices and decisions - as somehow making him deserving of a bullet.

For most people who are offended by the shooting, it's not primarily a racial issue. It's a case of a young man who was pursued and shot for no good reason, with the police dropping the ball on the case. Sure, race comes into play at the level of the police investigation, where the department's seeming acceptance of the stereotype advanced by Will and Buchanan is viewed by many as playing a role in their casual approach to investigation and the decision not to charge Zimmerman. But what those who snicker, "Zimmerman is a registered Democrat" or "Zimmerman's mom was Hispanic" don't (or perhaps aren't bright enough to) understand is that they are the ones introducing identity politics into the case. It's they who don't understand that the justified anger at the shooting of Martin and the treatment of the investigation (and of Martin's family) by the police is not dependent upon Zimmerman's political beliefs or ethnicity.

When Will Israel Attack Iran

The question keeps being asked, but I think the answer remains pretty much the same: Israel is not going to attack Iran. If it were going to do so, we would be having the same sort of after-the-fact discussion we had when Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor back in 1981, or Syria's under-construction reactor in 2007. Instead we are seeing an odd form of lobbying and advocacy - to the effect of, "We're going to bomb Iran soon, perhaps within weeks or even days, but we'll refrain from bombing Iran if you (the U.S.) promise to do the job for us at a fixed point in time in the future."

Let's also recall that we've been warned that Iran is only a few years away from developing nuclear weapons for roughly twenty years - by the same guy who's presently pressing for war. Let's also remember that an attack means at best a delay of two, three, five years before we're either back to war or confronting a nuclear-armed Iran. That is, assuming everything goes perfectly, the day after we successfully obliterate Iran's entire nuclear weapons program it will remain accurate to say that Iran could have nuclear weapons in two or three years. And things won't go perfectly.

So far, President Obama appears to have outmaneuvered Netanyahu, imposing sanctions that (like most sanctions) are probably counter-productive but make it look like the west is "doing something", engineering a probable new round of negotiations with Iran with a possibility of weapons inspections, giving Israel some new bunker-busters (again) that it can use should it decide to bomb Iran (and work out the logistics of getting its jets there and back - easier said than done), and made the Republican candidates' demagoguery sound pretty childish. (Unilateral sanctions, anyone?) Perhaps, though, it's more accurate to say that Obama has outmaneuvered the voices in the Republican Party and his own that are pushing for yet another war, with Netanyahu being more of the spokesperson for that mindset than the driving force behind the "war now" crowd.

Pat Buchanan cynically imagines that an October showdown or war with Iran that "will mean the nation rallies around [President Obama] and he wins a second term". I think it's pretty obvious that's not either how the President sees things, nor is it consistent with reality. Again, if we were talking Syria in 2007 or Iraq in 1981, this would be a done deal. We're talking instead about a nation that could cause real problems for the U.S. in its continuing missions in the Middle East, and could cause problems for Israel around the globe. The last thing the President needs is for gas prices to spike and the economy to tank, right before an election, even if he could thump his chest and say "We're at war." Any showdown short of war will look pretty much like the status quo.

Two big issues that don't seem to get enough attention in the coverage of the push for war are what the war would look like, and what would be the likely result or benefit. If we assume that Iran's nuclear program could be mostly eliminated exclusively through a sustained bombing campaign, I suspect that we would be hitting enough nuclear and nuclear-related sites in civilian centers that the pictures of collateral damage coming out of Iran would be highly inflammatory and harmful to U.S. interests. A land war? Some may want it, but given recent history I don't think that there's a high probability of that type of multi-trillion dollar war of choice. I've heard a number of accounts suggesting that there is strong opposition to an attack on Iran from within the U.S. military - and I can't say I find that surprising. National security writer Thomas Ricks shares his perspective,

A nuclear Iran is not good, and not preferable, but it is not the end of the world. To bomb makes little sense and may be the policy equivalent of committing suicide out of the fear of death.

Ricks compares containment to what we face with Pakistan and North Korea, but I suspect that it would actually be easier to contain Iran, as it's my impression that Iran's goal is to be at the point that it can assemble and test a nuclear weapon at any time it chooses, but that it does not actually intend to do so (for religious and practical reasons) unless its hand is forced. Before Iran is a meaningful threat to the region it not only needs to successfully test a nuclear device, it needs to have a viable means of delivering that device into another nation's territory. Iran knows that there's a substantial chance that a successful nuclear test will trigger an immediate war with the U.S., whereas being the turn of a key away from producing a weapon would allow it to demonstrate a nuclear deterrent should a foreign nation start to mobilize for attack.

Tom Engelhardt sees the President's position as unduly hawkish,

The president had offered a new definition of “aggression” against this country and a new war doctrine to go with it. He would, he insisted, take the U.S. to war not to stop another nation from attacking us or even threatening to do so, but simply to stop it from building a nuclear weapon - and he would act even if that country were incapable of targeting the United States. That should have been news.

But it's not news, because the same thing has been implied for the past twenty years. Also, I expect that the U.S. would (continue to) justify its actions under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and would push hard for UN approval of any military action. Beyond that, rhetoric about nations that are "our enemies" has been at times over-the-top pretty much since the time we started to have Presidents.

Pat Buchanan and the War on Christmas....

Given the number of years Pat Buchanan has been rehearsing and repeating his argument that there's a War on Christmas, you would think that he could by now build a more compelling case. When I received a card from a Jewish friend wishing me "Happy Holidays", for example, that was neither evidence of a war on Christmas or Hanukkah, nor was it evidence of an effort to inject secularity into the holiday or to deny the existence of a Christian majority. It was a demonstration of goodwill and inclusiveness toward people of other religions.

Still, some people aren't happy unless they're imagining themselves at the epicenter of a culture war. Take Pat Buchanan please, for example. Complaining "Whose Country Is It, Anyway", Buchanan whines that the numbers of "Christmas-haters... have grown since the days when it was only the village atheist or the ACLU pest who sought to kill Christmas." To support this claim, he resorts to a Washington Times article¹, which (par for the course) relies on "Reader's Digest Reasoning",

Although more formally known as the "Hasty Generalization", I think of that type of fallacious logic as "Readers Digest reasoning" because, with no offense intended to that publication, that is where I first encountered this particular rhetorical tool, and it is one that publication has historically used with significant frequency. The proponent of a position collects a set of sensational anecdotes, and strings them together to advance a political position. If you look past the surface such an argument usually falls apart pretty quickly - the "examples" are found to be completely unrelated and isolated, and the "trend" ostensibly shown by stringing them together simply doesn't exist.

Buchanan's parade of horrors seems pretty pedestrian - a couple of childish pranks, an ill-behaved protester, a couple of examples of people exercising their right to present their own religious views when the government chooses to allow private displays of religious belief in a public space. Buchanan quotes from the Times editorial, "In the Wisconsin statehouse, a sign informs visitors, 'Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.'" A bit of digging reveals that it's... pretty insignificant, as signs go.

Buchanan complains,

The First Amendment does protect what they are doing. But what they are doing is engaging in hate speech and anti-Christian bigotry. For what is the purpose of what they are about, if not to wound, offend, insult and mock fellow Americans celebrating the happiest day of their calendar year?

Buchanan's hyperbole having been duly noted, his conclusion is nonsense. The First Amendment does not create a freedom from being offended, nor would some form of blasphemy law be consistent with the First Amendment. Further, although presumably Buchanan would impose a blasphemy law exclusively to the benefit of Christianity, it is fair to observe that public expressions and affirmations of Christianity can potentially offend people of other faiths. Even if we pretend that it's impossible for the typical American to avoid encountering one of the four isolated, trivial examples Buchanan provides of the "War on Christmas", it would not be consistent with the Constitution to limit the First Amendment's protections only to Christian sensitivities.

Buchanan continues, "Even if a man disbelieves this, why would he interfere with or deny his fellow countrymen, three in four of whom still profess to be Christians, their right to celebrate in public this joyous occasion?" First, virtually nobody would be aware of the four, trivial incidents Buchanan cites if not for the effort that people like Buchanan make to magnify and publicize them. Second, sorry, if you allow your holiday to be ruined by learning that an atheist argues that the world needs kindness and not religion, the message of the Wisconsin sign, or that an insignificant number of people respond in an immature manner to the use of pubic spaces to advance a religion they don't share, you have bigger problems than a "War on Christmas".

Buchanan can't keep himself from attacking the President as part of this "war" on Christmas and Christianity.

Not long ago, the Supreme Court (1892) and three U.S. presidents — Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter — all declared America to be a "Christian nation."

They did not mean that any particular denomination had been declared America’s national religion — indeed, that was ruled out in the Constitution — but that we were predominantly a Christian people.

I'm left wondering, where are Buchanan's heroes - Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George Bush, on that list? Where's any Republican President? The issue, of course, is not that Republican Presidents have not made expressions of faith, but that they have not used Buchanan's preferred magic words. Reagan's statement that we're a nation "Under God" is inclusive - the sort of quote that undermines the very notion of (or makes Reagan a part of) the supposed war on Christianity and Christmas.

Having told us that a President should feel free to affirm our nation's Christianity, not through a literal expression that "" but through an acknowledgment that "", what does Buchanan do next? He lies.²

Was it a manifestation of tolerance and maturity, or pusillanimity, that Christians allowed themselves to be robbed of their inheritance to a point where Barack Obama could assert without contradiction that we Americans "do not consider ourselves to be a Christian nation"?

If you're like me, your first reaction to that claim would be skepticism - Buchanan provides no source, no date, no context, and the meaning Buchanan attributes to the statement is inconsistent with the President's beliefs and philosophies. Fortunately the President's statements are all easily accessible through whitehouse.gov, and the comment is found within a statement made in April, 2009, during President Obama's trip to Turkey:

I think that where -- where there's the most promise of building stronger U.S.-Turkish relations is in the recognition that Turkey and the United States can build a model partnership in which a predominantly Christian nation and a predominantly Muslim nation, a Western nation and a nation that straddles two continents -- that we can create a modern international community that is respectful, that is secure, that is prosperous; that there are not tensions, inevitable tensions, between cultures, which I think is extraordinarily important.

That's something that's very important to me. And I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is -- although as I mentioned, we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

Buchanan has told us that a President's statement that we're a "Christian nation" means "that we [a]re predominantly a Christian people" - you know, exactly what the President said. And when he acknowledges that the Presidents who have described the U.S. as a Christian nation "did not mean that any particular denomination had been declared America’s national religion", that's also exactly what the President said.

Buchanan's criticism thus becomes, "Rather than saying that we're a 'Christian nation', by which he would mean that we're predominantly a Christian people living in a land with no national religion, the President said that we're predominantly a Christian people living in a land with no national religion - and I'm horrified." That takes us back to the earlier issue - rather than imagining a war on Christmas or misrepresenting the President's statements to manufacture outrage, perhaps Buchanan should spend some of the Christmas season actually thinking about and reflecting upon the meaning of the religion and holiday he purports to be defending.
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1. The Washington Times, of course, has an overt political agenda. Buchanan may appreciate the Unification Church's defense of his old boss, Richard Nixon, "back in the day", but it's interesting to me that he will accept without question the religious proclamations of a paper that is controlled by a family that is decidedly non-Christian and would just as soon the nation converted to their own faith.

2. A defender of Buchanan might attempt to argue that we should infer that Buchanan was speaking in ignorance of the facts, and that his flagrant misrepresentation of the President's statement should thus not be viewed as a lie because lying is an intentional act. If Buchanan wants to admit to that level of sloppiness with his facts and reasoning, I'll retract "He lies" and substitute, "He reveals himself as an ignorant buffoon".

Buchanan's Bucolic America

It has been noted that conservative pundits who talk about "the good old days" in which everything was sunshine and lollipops are writing about their childhood years.

I don’t mean to pick on this one randomly selected citizen. But this is something we hear all the time: that back in my day, things were simpler and better, and the America I remember from my youth is being destroyed. The best answer I’ve seen to this repeated complaint came from The Daily Show’s John Oliver. In the clip below, he makes what ought to have been an obvious point: “So just when was the simpler, better time that all these great Americans want us to return to? … They were children! … It was a better, simpler time because they were all 6 years old! For children, the world is always a happy, uncomplicated place!”

With that in mind it is perhaps not surprising that Pat Buchanan, who turned 12 in 1950, believes that the 1950's were an age of bliss and wonder. Buchanan can wax nostalgic about the age of legal segregation because he was and is blind to its realities, and can comfortably obsess on what he sees as bad hyphenation - black Americans self-identifying as "African-American" instead of simply "American".

I've previously commented on "good multiculturalism" versus "bad multiculturalism". I have never seen Pat Buchanan, or anybody like him, complain that there are 122,000,000 'hits' on Google for "Irish-American", that individuals and groups celebrate their Irish heritage, or that we as a nation celebrate St. Patrick's Day. I have never heard him complain that a person self-identified as Catholic instead of the more inclusive "Christian". That's all "good multiculturalism". Similarly, Buchanan erases episodes of multiculturalism from our nation's history and from world history. He complains,

No more will we all speak the same language. We will be bilingual and bi-national. Spanish radio and TV stations are already the fastest growing. In Los Angeles, half the people speak a language other than English in their own homes.

Never mind that we have always had ethnic communities in the United States, under such names as Chinatown and Little Italy, in which it was anything but unusual to find immigrants who spoke little to no English. Overlooking the fact that it's pretty easy to find television programming and even newspapers in any given language these days, do you doubt that markets would have responded with a greater number of media choices? Capitalism in action.

The old Christian churches — Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran and especially Episcopalian — are splitting, shrinking and dying.

When, at least since the early Sixteenth Century, has the Christian faith been immune from fragmentation and evolution? There's an irony here: many of the churches that are at the biggest risk of dying out are those associated with specific ethnicities. The Episcopal Church is the American offshoot of the Anglican Church - the Church of England. It was strongest when large numbers of Americans felt a strong ethnic affinity with England, and has declined as that connection has faded.

Buchanan's synopsis of the decline of American culture comes first with the lament that only 75 percent of Americans self-identify as Christian (down from 85% in 1990), and the hollow man:

What was morally repellent — promiscuity, homosexuality, abortion — is now seen by perhaps half the nation as natural, normal, healthy and progressive.

While acceptance of homosexuality has increased to the point that a majority now supports gay marriage, no significant number of Americans would describe either promiscuity or abortion as "natural, normal, healthy and progressive". Under Buchanan's thesis, even if the number is lower than in the past, having 75% of Americans self-identify as Christian should be seen as a good thing. Instead, that 75% consensus is said to mean that "The moral consensus and moral code Christianity gave to us has collapsed."

Buchanan complains,

In California’s prisons and among her proliferating ethnic gangs, a black-brown civil war has broken out.

That's quite unlike the "good gangs" of the 1950's - those boys could harmonize.

Buchanan presents an interesting statistical claim,

Where out-of-wedlock births in the 1950s were rare, today, 41 percent of all American children are born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent; among blacks, 71 percent. And the correlation between the illegitimacy rate, the drug rate, the dropout rate, the crime rate and the incarceration rate is absolute.

In regard to out-of-wedlock births, it should be noted that there were more teen births in the 1950's than in the present, and more "shotgun weddings". One could make a case that the rising acceptance of divorce and reproductive freedom, and the trend away from compelling young pregnant girls to marry, is a direct response to the societal coercion to which Buchanan would have us return.

But let's take Buchanan at face value. He tells us that the illegitimacy rate is up, and that correlation with the "drug rate" is absolute. But illicit drug usage peaked in the late 1970's, and both alcohol and cigarette consumption have also declined in recent decades. There is a strong correlation between age and illicit drug use, as younger people are more likely to use illicit drugs than are older people, and I suspect that Buchanan is disregarding that correlation in order to try to tie higher drug usage rates to specific ethnicities without regard to average and median age. He tells us that the correlation with the crime rate is absolute, but despite a sharp increase between 1960 and 1970, the crime rate leveled off, with peaks in 1980 and 1991 and a subsequent decline. (There's a stronger correlation between the crime rate and Pat Buchanan's political career than there is with illegitimacy.)

There is nothing talismanic about illegitimacy that raises the incarceration rate - being born to an unmarried mother doesn't change your genome - but it is fair to observe that the children of single parents are more likely to live in economically distressed homes and communities and poverty, an issue that does not seem to be on Buchanan's radar, is associated with a higher crime rate. It is reasonable to argue that marriage is a good way to stabilize households, increasing the chance that a child will have a better lifestyle, better parenting and more opportunity than a child raised by a single parent; it's an imperfect solution, but it is probably the most cost-effective to society.

Neocons says not to worry, the Constitution holds us together.

Which neocons are saying that... and who listens to neocons any more?

How can we be the “one nation, under God” of the Pledge of Allegiance, or the people “endowed by their Creator” with inalienable rights, if we cannot even identify or discuss or mention that God and that Creator in the schools of America?

What prevents classroom discussion of our founding documents, the religious beliefs of the founding fathers and the manner in which those beliefs are reflected in our founding documents? That is, other than the fact that some of the founding fathers had views on religion that would make Pat Buchanan very uncomfortable, perhaps to the point of accusing them of trying to destroy our common Christian heritage and values. Buchanan knows that discussion is possible in the classroom - for goodness sake, many school children open the day by reciting The Pledge of Allegiance - so why the hyperbolic deception?

Buchanan complains,

Do we agree on what the Ninth Amendment says about right to life? What about what the 14th Amendment says about affirmative action? What the Second Amendment says about the right to carry a concealed gun?

Buchanan would have us return to 1950's, when the consensus among those whose opinions mattered were that the Second Amendment did not protect an individual's right to bear arms, that "separate but equal" and segregation were good ways to deal with ethnic minorities, and it was difficult to get a safe abortion unless you were somewhat wealthy? Yeah, that would make everything better.

We Should Shed Tears for Corrupt Dictators?

Pat Buchanan appears to believe so:

But what must Mubarak think of us?

He stood by us through the final Reagan decade of the Cold War. At George H.W. Bush’s request, he sent his soldiers to fight alongside ours against fellow Arabs in Desert Storm. He stayed faithful to a peace with Israel his people detested. He cooperated with George Bush II in some of the nastier business of the War on Terror.

A dictator, yes, but also our man in the Arab world. Yet a few hundred thousand demonstrators in Cairo’s streets caused us to abandon him.

In the last half-century, how many others who cast their lot with us have we abandoned as “corrupt and dictatorial” when they started to lose their grip? Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. Thieu and Marshal Ky, Lon Nol, Chiang Kai-shek, Marcos, the Shah, Somoza, Pinochet — the list goes on.

When we needed them, they were hailed as America’s great friends. When they needed us, we abandoned them in the name of our rediscovered democratic values.

Buchanan was in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan Administrations, so he's in a position to tell us whether any of the dictators for whom he weeps ever came to the President with a question such as, "I want to create a legacy of bringing my people into enlightenment, creating an educated, free democratic society - can I count on your help?" My guess is that the answer is none. On the other hand, were we to count the times they might have approached a President with a question like, "I need help training my secret police to squelch dissent - can I count on your help?"...

As for Mubarak's cooperation with the U.S. and its principal goals in the region, yes, he did cooperate. But would Buchanan have us believe that no quid pro quo was involved? That even if Egypt were not receiving close to $2 billion per year in aid and participating in U.S. military training exercises, Mubarak would have been as cooperative - or would have cooperated with us at all?

Buchanan sees Mubarak as wanting a better legacy than fleeing his country in the face of popular protest. No doubt. But if that happens it won't be because of anything the United States did. As with the other dictators and tyrants on Buchanan's list, it will be because of the way he ran his country. What are Mubarak's accomplishments as leader of Egypt? If he's looking for a place in the history books, being deposed may in fact be the best way to keep himself from being a footnote between the Presidency of Anwar Sadat and that of his successor.

Mubarak could redeem himself and maintain power until a transition date of his own choosing, if he embraced the democratic process and started speaking about creating a safe context for elections in the fall. He could transform the tail end of his presidency into an interim government, bridging Egypt's undemocratic, dictatorial past with its (possible) more democratic and open future.

Also, if he has to turn tail and flee in the next few days it won't be because the U.S. hasn't tried to support him and to facilitate an orderly transition of government. It will be because, in lieu of making any substantive promise of or timetable for reform, he decided to try to put down the protests with violence. How is that anybody's fault but his own.

No, I don't want to say that U.S. policies don't play a role in this. As part of his quid pro quo with the United States, Mubarak helped sustain policies that were very unpopular with some, most, and perhaps at times all of his population. The U.S. government appreciated that type of loyalty to U.S. interests - but at the same time the government, most notably the administrations of Buchanan's past employers, were quick to withdraw support or attempt to oust allies of this stripe who weren't willing or able to demonstrate the required degree of loyalty. Mubarak might have had difficulty in a more open, democratic society, maintaining his nation's blockade of the Gaza Strip. But nobody said democracy was easy.

As for the rhetorical question, "what must Mubarak think of us," I guess it depends upon whether he knows his history. But in the greater scheme of things it doesn't matter. That's the part that's gotta hurt, right? That (albeit in large part due to his own choice and action) we see him as largely dispensable. That one of his biggest U.S. defenders categorizes him alongside Lon Nol and, implicitly, Manuel Noriega. (Should Saddam Hussein be on Buchanan's list?)

Wars and Stimulus Spending

Pat Buchanan raises an argument I've seen elsewhere, in relation to David Broder's push for a military confrontation with Iran:

Cynicism aside, what is wrong with Broder’s analysis?

First, how exactly are “preparations for war” on Iran going to improve our economy when two actual wars costing $1 trillion have left us in the deepest recession since the 1930s?

Were those wars just not big enough?

The eye-popping cost aside, it would appear that, yes, spending on the two wars wasn't enough to have had a significant impact on the economy.

Initially, the war in Iraq made a substantial contribution to the widening of the budget deficit. During a period of economic sluggishness, this would be expected to stimulate aggregate demand. However, any stimulative effect was minor since military outlays increased by only 0.3 percentage points of GDP in 2003 and an additional 0.2 percentage points in 2004 (if measured by the supplemental appropriations, the increased outlays equaled about 0.6 percentage points of GDP in 2003 and 0.7 percentage points in 2004).

Also, the financial industry collapse that precipitated the present crisis occurred many years into those wars - they may have had some stimulative effect during the bulk of Bush's Presidency but, as they say, that was then, this is now.

Pat Buchanan, Concern Troll

Pat Buchanan plays the "racial politics" game, accusing President Obama of "abandon[ing] blacks". How does Obama do that, you ask? By getting behind an immigration reform that Pat Buchanan opposes, and by not making appointments that Pat Buchanan would decry as "affirmative action" - that is, "discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants".

With friends like Pat....

Race and Educational Performance

When addressing issues of race, one hardly expects Pat Buchanan to represent the enlightened view, but he usually provides a better gloss over his views than is offered here. I'm among the first to admit, even to emphasize, that people are not equally talented. Some aspects of ability are vested in us by nature, some by nurture, most as a combination. To Buchanan, though, it all turns on race:

Teach all kids to the limit of their ability, while recognizing that all are not equal in their ability to read, write, learn, compute or debate, any more than they are equally able to play in a band or excel on a ball field. For an indeterminate future, Mexican kids are not going to match Asian kids in math.

The first part of that statement seems reasonable, although it's offered within the context of an argument to walk away from trying to improve student performance in impoverished school districts. The latter part of the argument strips away Buchanan's facade.

It is not unreasonable to look at academic performance by ethnic group and observe that there are differences in performance, nor is it unreasonable to look at a history of initiatives to equalize performance and observe that they have largely been failures. But it's something else entirely to say that the problem is because of race, and that we must wash our hands of the notion that, using Buchanan's example, Mexicans can excel at math.

It would not be particularly difficult to find representatives from any given ethnic group that can run circles around Buchanan in math. For that matter, it would not be difficult to find a Mexican student who was outperforming Asian students in math. Moreover, you can find significant differences in academic performance between Asian immigrant communities - and for that matter, Mexico is not homogeneous.

I personally believe that the current generation of reformers are doing their cause, and the students affected by their policies, no great favor by pretending that differences in student performance can be overcome simply by demanding more from teachers, while pretending that home and community environments can be made irrelevant. I have a real problem with the "teach to the test" model that has become so popular, with standardized tests used to measure both student and teacher performance. Never mind "critical thinking". Never mind whether students who have been raised "to grade level" through rote teaching methods over lengthened school days actually learn academic skills that will translate to better performance in the real world or prepare them for post-secondary education. It takes a lot more work (and money), but efforts to build a healthy community alongside quality schools are much more likely to bring about solid improvement.

It should be no surprise that children who grow up impoverished with uneducated parents in failed, violent communities have a difficult time adapting to the standard academic environment, let alone performing at the level of students who come to school prepared and socialized for the school environment. That shouldn't be difficult to understand. To put it mildly, ignoring that in favor of arguing simplistic racial determinism, "Asians are better at math, so why even pretend Mexicans can perform at that level," reflects weak thinking.

Diplomacy as Speed Chess?

Roger Cohen's impatience is bringing out his inner (and outer) Kissinger:

I found myself seated next to Henry Kissinger at a New York dinner and asked him how he thought President Barack Obama was doing.

"He reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his opening in six simultaneous games," Kissinger said. "But he hasn’t completed a single game and I’d like to see him finish one."

Cohen bought into Kissinger's analogy without asking the appropriate follow-up questions, "How many chess games did you finish during your first ten months, whether as National Security Advisor or Secretary of State? And how many key matches did you and Nixon win?" In one particularly memorable multi-year game, the Vietnam War, the Kissinger team pulled an "illegal war in Cambodia and Laos" gambit, attempted an end-game that revolved around the Paris Peace Accords and "peace with honor", and shortly thereafter was checkmated. Maybe Kissinger there's a reason Kissinger chose the word "finish" instead of "win".

Kissinger could respond that these issues are hard, many will take years to wrap up, and it may take many more years before it's clear who won or lost a particular match. And that would be a fair response, but for the fact that it undermines his analogy. It's fun to drop bon mots, but it's hard to imagine that Kissinger didn't know he was pushing for an impatient response to problems that can only be resolved through care and patience - and perhaps not even then. (How well did Kissinger's policies work to unify Cyprus? Does he still want Cyprus under Turkish control?)

Cohen eagerly accepts the role of the impatient American:

I thought that wasn’t a bad image for Obama’s international gambits, and then here, at the first Halifax International Security Forum, I heard a similar observation from one participant: "We’ve had the set-up, but is there a middle game?" Or, put another way, can this probing, intelligent president close anything?

Cohen should know better, and probably does. Most likely, though, he doesn't care about the half-dozen high stakes games President Obama is working through. Most likely he cares about one, maybe two, and he's less concerned that Obama can't "close" than he is that Obama will choose to close in a manner inconsistent with his own preconceptions of how the matter should be handled.

Cohen also misses the boat with his comment on Obama's talk of a world without nuclear weapons,

It’s an idea with resonance, and may provide some moral suasion over countries contemplating pursuit of a bomb, but I can’t help recalling that the worlds of 1914 and 1939 were worlds without nukes. No thanks to that.

To bring up the subject is something of a red herring, given that even if Obama makes progress toward reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world, I know of nobody with the slightest sense that he will eliminate nuclear weapons during his Presidency - at best it would take decades. But he should consider also that the present world is nothing like 1914 or 1939. Now granted, should Russia or China start acting in a militarily threatening manner to the United States or each other, possession of nuclear weapons by all parties does deter transforming a cold war into a hot war. But the U.S. can presently militarily crush any nation it chooses... except for those with nuclear weapons.

Does Cohen believes that détente can be achieved between any two nuclear-armed nations? Clearly not. The present danger is that an otherwise militarily weak nuclear-armed state might use its weapons in a war with a neighbor, might lose control of its nuclear arsenal in a coup, or might sell or trade its knowledge, components, or even a nuclear device in exchange for cash or weapons. That's the danger Obama is attempting to address.

On Russia, Cohen offers a conclusion that sounds like it was lifted from a corporation's annual report: "I don’t believe Obama has yet shifted the basic confrontational optic of a resurgent Russia emerging from the humiliation of imperial collapse." Cohen sees Russia as having two conflicting approaches to the world: one comes from Dmitri Medvedev, and "The other perspective is called Vladimir Putin." (Ah, memories.) Is Cohen arguing that Obama needs to take a hard line with Russia and somehow force it to act against its perceived best interest on foreign national policies, such as its relations with Iran - with the probability that Russia will respond by saying no? Is he arguing that the U.S. should give up on diplomacy with Russia, and just let Russia do what it wants? Seriously, what's his point? As Cohen knows, we have no military option against Russia.

On Afghanistan, Cohen is critical that while Obama showed "clarity" in March by sending a lot more troops, he is presently showing "uncertainty" because he didn't immediately agree to send tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan seven months later. I'm not going to dig through Cohen's past writings to try to determine if he wrote something similar about Bush during the former administration's seven years of malign neglect of the Afghan war, but it's worth noting that by way of comparison Obama is running laps around the mediocre record of his predecessor. No, the real fear isn't that Obama's indecisive - it's that he won't commit to endless war:

I worry now that Obama’s quest for perfect calibration will yield a less than resounding fudge where the tenacious message of a troop increase is undermined by talk of exit timing. That’s not how you break the will of an enemy.

How many times in its history has Afghanistan been the subject of an invasion attempt, invasion, or occupation? How many times in its history has it been successfully pacified, even when occupied by a superpower? Cohen truly believes that if Obama doesn't remind the Afghan people that we'll eventually pack up and go home, they somehow won't remember centuries of history - that the foreign occupier always packs up and goes home? Or that they have failed to notice that the same holds true in regard to any modern military engagement involving a long-term occupation in which the occupying power didn't engage in a massive population transfer into the occupied territory? Come on.

Cohen also seems to believe that every leader in the world wants to be Obama's best friend, and that they're all stinging at perceived slights:

In Europe, a more modest reset attempt has been compromised with political leaders (if not the public) by a perception of cool distance, underscored when Obama did not show at 20th-anniversary celebrations of the Berlin Wall’s fall. Feelings are particularly strong in Paris, where mutterings about Obama’s “Carterization” are heard. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who ushered France back to NATO’s integrated military command structure, and shattered political taboos dictating coolness toward America, has seen his hopes for a special relationship evaporate.

(Ah, memories.) It sounds like he's describing junior high school. "Angela threw a big party but Barack said he was too busy to come. All of Angela's friends are mad at him. Nicolas offered Barack a BFF bracelet, and Barack told him 'I don't want to be your best friend,' and now Nicolas doesn't like him any more and called him a loser." Again, come on.

Anne Applebaum has a better take on what's involved in Europe, noting that there's nothing close to a European consensus or European decision-maker with whom Obama can work on the key issues of the day, and she correctly notes that nations like China are going to pursue their own foreign policy interests, although her conclusion (while suitable for an editorial) seems overblown:

Europe might have a new phone number, but when Obama calls, the person on the other end of the line will still be unable to act. "Europe" will not be a unified entity capable of coordinating a unified policy in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East or anywhere else anytime soon. Europe cannot, in short, become America's full partner in foreign policy....

This does mean that the Obama administration has a problem, however: Having come to office promising to work with allies, it may soon discover that there are no allies with which to work. Europe is still our best hope, because Europeans share most of our values. But organizing sanctions with a divided Europe - never mind a military operation - will continue to be a major chore. China, meanwhile, is acquiring vast foreign interests, trading in Africa and South America as well as Asia, along with a vast army to match. But China appears uninterested in joining an international campaign against terrorism, nuclear proliferation or anything else.

Global military and security thus look set to remain in the hands of the United States, whether the United States wants it or not. Halfway through his presidency, George W. Bush found he had to drop unilateralism in favor of diplomacy. Now one wonders: At some point in his presidency, will Obama find he has to drop diplomacy in favor of unilateralism, too?

Cohen seems to be operating under the conceit that U.S. foreign policy interests are everybody's interests, and thus that it's absurd that Obama can't handshake his way to consensus - that it's somehow Obama's failure. He underestimates the effect of Bush's unilateralism, which if anything caused our traditional allies to become quite accustomed to saying "no". He disregards the fact that foreign nations have their own issues to worry about, and their most pressing issues may not be the same as ours. He also overlooks the fact that there can sometimes be a political gain to a politician, even in an allied nation, for standing up to U.S. pressure.

I also like this one:

In Israel-Palestine, Obama underestimated the damage of the past decade and has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

No, what happened was that Obama overestimated the resiliency of the U.S. economy, and severely underestimated his own party's willingness to address serious domestic issues such as stimulating economic recovery or passing a healthcare reform bill, and has had to expend significant political capital on those issues. Netanyahu, ever an opportunist, recognized that he could say "no" to the Obama Administration without consequence, as the Obama Administration is not presently positioned to impose a consequence. Is it a great shame that a Democratically controlled Congress doesn't have the President's back on key domestic and foreign policy issues? Absolutely. But what does Cohen expect President Obama to do about that?

Cohen has a sense of how skewed perspectives are in Israel, but compare and contrast Benny Morris who describes Obama as "a man who has, in the international arena, shown a proclivity for indecision (except when it comes to Israeli settlements in the West Bank)." Even with the retreat from his earlier demands for a mere freeze on new construction within those settlements, developed in knowing violation of international law, Morris sees Obama as having taken a hard line against Israel. (Meanwhile, Morris argues that an Israeli attack on Iran could bring chaos to the region, then turns around and suggests that it's the responsibility of the U.S. to bomb Iran so Israel doesn't have to, or at least to give it a green light and a massive infusion of high tech weaponry. Morris is definitely a person who brings to mind the phrase, "With friends like these....") It's also worth observing that Cohen sounds an awful lot like Pat Buchanan.¹

It's worth remembering that Cohen very recently argued that the time for achieving a bona fide peace, with a two state solution, started to vanish under President Clinton and was squandered under Bush.²

Obama, who has his Nobel already, should ratchet expectations downward. Stop talking about peace. Banish the word. Start talking about détente. That’s what Lieberman wants; that’s what Hamas says it wants; that’s the end point of Netanyahu’s evasions.

Peace is unattainable, Netanyahu's evasive, and all of this arose before Obama took office, yet it's somehow Obama's fault that his proposal for peace talks isn't working out. Or perhaps Cohen is now of the position that U.S. Presidents should pretend that the Israel-Palestine conflict is irrelevant to U.S. foreign policy interests, and give neither time nor effort to resolving it. Even a grandmaster will have difficulty ending a match, at least in a positive way, if Cohen is correct that he inherited a board where his only pieces are a king and a pawn while his opponent has retained most of his pieces.

The only thing Cohen offers that could approximate as a proposed solution is that Obama spend more time talking about "human rights and freedom". Does Cohen believe that in the prism of junior high school through which he views Europe, that will dissuade Nicolas Sarcozy from comparing Obama to Carter?

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1. Dan Larison offers a response to Pat Buchanan's arguments here.

2. You want to talk ineffectual? Or "dithering"? How about G.W. and his "road map" to nowhere?

Our Corrupt Allies

Pat Buchanan is upset that the media is paying so much attention to the corruption and ineptitude of Hamad Karzai. He argues that when we're involved in military action in a state or region, and depict a leader as corrupt, it means we're about to abandon our support for him.

When Chiang Kai-shek, who fought the Japanese for four years before Pearl Harbor, began losing to Mao’s Communists, we did not blame ourselves for being a faithless ally, we blamed him. He was incompetent; he was corrupt.

We did not lose China. He did.

Let's take a look at that allegation:

Mao Zedong’s communists eventually came to power in 1949. A year earlier, in June 1948, Chiang wrote in his diary that the Kuomintang had failed, not because of external enemies but because of disintegration and rot from within.

You see, sometimes when a foreign leader or his administration is depicted as corrupt and incompetent, the depiction is accurate.

Buchanan similarly complains that South Vietnam's President Diem was depicted as "a dictator... who had lost touch with his people", something he fails to demonstrate is in any way false. He similarly whines that Cambodia's Lon Nol "got the same treatment", again failing to demonstrate that the treatment was undeserved. For some reason, he neglects to mention such illustrious leaders once supported by the United States, including the Shah of Iran, Manuel Noriega... the laundry list of thugs and despots the U.S. has at times supported in South and Central America.... Should we include Saddam Hussein?

Yes, when it's convenient we have historically dropped support for such "allies", and it's no coincidence that the public narrative goes from their being "important allies to the U.S." to "corrupt and incompetent, an impediment to our goals in the region", but the convenient timing of the admission of corruption doesn't make it any less true. It instead highlights how we care more about advancing our interests in a given region than we do about whether that region enjoys honest, scrupulous governance. Buchanan was an assistant to Richard Nixon - yet he claims to know nothing of realpolitik?

Buchanan's memory cannot be so short that he has forgotten his time in the Reagan Administration. Perhaps he remembers a guy named Pol Pot - an incompetent, genocidal leader responsible for the deaths of probably millions of Cambodians. What did Ronald Reagan do after Vietnam toppled Pot's regime?

Rollback was the American end of the proxy war fought between the two superpowers for power and influence in the developing world. The basis was childishly simple: my enemy's enemy is my friend.

To that end the Reagan administration insisted on recognising the deposed Khmer Rouge government in exile at the UN, mostly because it was the pro-Soviet Vietnamese that had done the deposing. This recognition helped maintain a civil war in which many Cambodians were killed and many thousands of landmines were laid.

What defense does Buchanan now offer for Rios Montt, whom Reagan described as "a man of great personal integrity"? Reagan's high praise for Jonas Savimbi? Is it problematic that those leaders are now judged based upon the facts, not upon Reagan's (I would hope knowingly) fabricated songs of praise?

No, fundamentally, Buchanan knows the charges are true. The problem is that the truth is becoming known:

That there are warlords who are war criminals, allied with the Afghan regime and us, that drug-traffickers are abetted by high officials, that Karzai stole the election, no one denies.

That the Pakistani intelligence services are shot through with elements loyal to a Taliban they helped bring to power in Kabul, that there are Pakistani army officers who believe they should be defending their country against India, not fighting America’s war in Waziristan, is also undeniable.

But what does it avail us to insult these people who have cast their lot with us, many of whom will, with famines and friends, pay a far more terrible price than we if we lose these wars.

I'm sorry, but I don't feel any great sympathy for people who "cast their lot with us", enrich themselves, their families and their clans at the expense of their countries and countrymen, undermine U.S. political goals and military efforts, and ultimately lose our support due to true allegations of their greed, corruption and incompetence. I can't feel sorry for somebody who thought that "casting his lot" with the U.S. meant "winning the lottery", and who if deposed will most likely live out his life in a billionaire's exile, supported by the money he has stolen from his (and our) country.

Does Buchanan really believe it's too much to ask of somebody like Karzai to steal a little bit less, or to accept a small risk of losing an election he probably could have won honestly, in order to help us achieve our goals of improving and stabilizing the country he claims to lead? Well, yeah, I guess he does. Because they "trusted us", apparently, to not care if they demolished the foundation of our efforts.

Afghanistan - Buchanan v Brooks

A few things seem to be consistently absent from the musings of proponents of the continuation or escalation of the war in Afghanistan:

• Any sense of what the victory would look like - what it would mean to "win";

• Any sense of how victory would be accomplished, save perhaps by "sending more troops" or "stayling longer"; and

• Any sense of how much time it would take to achieve even an undefined "victory".

It's pretty easy to make fun of David Brooks for his inconsistency in relation to... everything beyond his apparent conceit that all of the world's problems can be solved militarily. (Come to think of it, you can make fun of that conceit, as well.) It's no surprise that he insists that the war must go on, with a massive escalation of both forces and combat operations.

The record suggests what Gen. Stanley McChrystal clearly understands — that only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success. This is a doctrine, as General McChrystal wrote in his remarkable report, that puts population protection at the center of the Afghanistan mission, that acknowledges that insurgencies can only be defeated when local communities and military forces work together.

To put it concretely, this is a doctrine in which small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.

This is probably correct - that our path to a "victory" that's meaningful to U.S. eyes, we need to commit tens of thousands of new troops, put them in the direct line of fire throughout Afghanistan, and keep them there for... Brooks doesn't say, but probably for a generation or two. There's a peculiarity to the type of argument Brooks offers:

These are the realistic choices for America’s Afghanistan policy — all out or all in, surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building.

That is, we're repeatedly told how "tremendously unpopular" the Taliban is in Afghanistan, but at the same time that if U.S. forces depart they'll easily regain control of the nation.

Second, the enemy is wildly hated. Only 6 percent of Afghans want a Taliban return, while NATO is viewed with surprising favor. This is not Vietnam or even Iraq.

If Brooks' claim is true, simply arming and offering basic militia training to the masses, backed up with U.S. air power, logistical support, and partnering on more difficult operations, should be enough to keep the Taliban out of power forever. With a reasonably stable central government and a U.S.-backed, U.S. trained national army (even if rather ragtag, let alone what Brooks describes as "a successful institution") it should be even easier. So what's really going on? The most obvious inference is that the Afghan people have a Churchillian view of Taliban rule - that it's the worst form of government except for all the others, or at least the alternatives they're being offered. If that's the case it doesn't bode well either for the success of a counter-insurgency or for the long-term success of the Afghan government.

I'm not sure what approach to Afghanistan could have pleased Pat Buchanan, who isn't a fan of either U.S. military intervention or nation-building. Recall his words at the time:

I completely support what we're doing in Afghanistan, by the way. It's being morally done in a just way. I back the president in what we're doing. But I urge him to be cautious in Phase 2.

What "Phase 2" would have pleased Buchanan? Did he ever take the time to define a scope for an acceptable "Phase 2", or how the goals of "Phase 2" would be accomplished? It seems like he took the easiest of easy paths - embracing the popular invasion of Afghanistan, issuing a nebulous caution about what might happen after a successful invasion, and leaving himself plenty of room to impugn others for making "the wrong decisions" if they didn't achieve the impossible - a quick, easy exit that left a stable, reasonably progressive, pro-western government firmly in control of the nation.

Buchanan does correctly identify the costs of the Brooks-endorsed approach of escalation and counter-insurgency,

If Obama meets some or all of McChrystal’s request, America will stave off defeat in the short term. But the cost will be hundreds and perhaps thousands more U.S. dead, tens of billions more sunk, growing divisions in our country and more innocent Afghan victims. And the surge may simply push a U.S. withdrawal and Taliban takeover a few years off into the future.

But sometimes Buchanan's message gets muddied by his dislike for President Obama:

This assumes that Afghanistan is unwinnable, that America does not have the perseverance or will to send the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops for the decade needed to crush the Taliban and create a government and army able to stand on their own when we depart.

If, however, Obama comes to believe the cost of “victory” in blood, money and years is not worth it, or the American people, already against the war and adding more troops, will not sustain it, or the war is unwinnable, then we need to look defeat in the face.

In other words, even if we go full-out, put tens our hundreds of thousands of troops into Afghanistan, and do everything McChrystal wants, taking as long as it takes to crush the Taliban and establish a stable Afghan government, it will be Obama's fault. Buchanan offers Obama only one alternative: be weak, withdraw, and jeopardize the security of the nation, and perhaps collapse the U.S. "empire". Seriously:

Russia’s withdrawal of 1988-89 led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. What would a U.S. withdrawal do to the American Empire?

Despite his full support for the decision to get us into this war, and despite seven years of failed war policy under Bush, if Obama can't turn this thing around and quickly and easily "crush the Taliban and create a government and army able to stand on their own when we depart", he's to be personally faulted for whatever happens - and yes, he's to be faulted even if he achieves that goal but with "hundreds and perhaps thousands more U.S. dead, tens of billions more sunk, growing divisions in our country and more innocent Afghan victims". Buchanan's thesis would be more compelling if he were willing to admit that he has never had a coherent notion of how achieve what he now describes as the only acceptable victory, let alone achieve that without a greater investment of blood and money, or anything that might be described as "nation building". So we're left with this:

For America, loss of Afghanistan would poison U.S. politics as did the loss of China and of Vietnam. It would discredit nation-building for decades and ring down the curtain on Wilsonian interventionism for a generation. And it could bring about the defeat of Barack Obama as the liberal who lost the war al-Qaida began on 9-11.

Is it just me, or does that sound like an outcome Buchanan would applaud?

Pat Buchanan Channels James Watt

James Watt, 1983:

"I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent."

Pat Buchanan, 2009:

Six nominees have been sent to Congress by Democrats since 1964: Thurgood Marshall, an African-American, four Jewish nominees - Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer - and one wise Latina woman.

It's hard to know what to make of Buchanan's thought exercise - although he nominally asks, "Why No Evangelical Justice?", his argument are at odds with the positions he recently articulated to Rachel Maddow. If I were to give him the benefit of the doubt, I would say that his essay is meant to illustrate the absurdity of Watt's brand of "diversity by the numbers", attributing it to his political opponents, then (ostensibly ironically) suggesting that it be used to advance a political agenda with which he sympathizes:

Republicans should now be searching for highly qualified Evangelical Christian judges and constitutional scholars, women as well as men - and, when falsely accused of being “anti-Hispanic” or “anti-woman,” ought to reply: “What do you liberals have against white Christians, man or woman, not to have named one in 45 years?”

The problem for Buchanan is that James Watt-style bean counting, and similar appeals to grievance against whites, are part and parcel of his entire intellectual career. Here he is in 1971:

My recommendation is now and has been that the Administration - in placing minority members in visible jobs — stop concentrating on the “media’s minorities” (Blacks, Mexican Americans, Spanish-speaking) which are tough to crack, almost solid Democratic — and begin focusing on the large ethnic minorities (Irish, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, etc.), the big minorities where the President’s name is not a dirty word, where the President’s personal beliefs and political actions are more consistent with their own.

In concrete terms,

[I]nstead of sending the orders out to all our other agencies - hire blacks and women - the order should go out - hire ethnic Catholics preferable women, for visible posts. One example: Italian Americans, unlike blacks, have never had a Supreme Court member - they are deeply concerned with their “criminal” image; they do not dislike the President. Give those fellows the “Jewish seat” or the “black seat” on the Court when it becomes available.

Buchanan is a living, breathing embodiment of his "ironic" argument, and there's little to indicate that he's ever favored meritocracy when it came to anything other than impeding the progress of minorities. Does he expect his readers not to know that? Buchanan alludes to his opposition to the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, ostensibly a matter of her being "unqualified", but where in his historic writings can we find any suggestion that he would not have found her to be qualified based on the same résumé, had she only been Catholic? Similarly, in relation to Sotomayor, had she only been conservative... and possibly Italian?

A Little Consistency?

Pat Buchanan argues,

Listen, it certainly is. Look at her own words in "The New York Times," from the tapes. It's in "The New York Times," June 11th. She said, "I'm an affirmative action baby." ... I got into Princeton on affirmative action. I got into Yale. I didn't have the scores that these other kids did.

How did she get on Yale law review? Affirmative action. How did she get on the federal bench by Moynihan? Moynihan needs a Hispanic woman just like Barack Obama needs a Hispanic woman.

That is not the criteria we ought to use, Rachel.

He later argues,

I would-I think the Republicans had an outstanding Latino who had outstanding grades, who was brilliant and was gutted, Miguel Estrada.

Estrada's résumé seems quite similar to Sotomayor's - that is to say, both attended top schools, made law review, graduated with honors, worked as government attorneys.... Beyond his being conservative and male, why does Buchanan give Estrada the benefit of the doubt in relation to his qualifications while attributing all of Sotomayor's achievements to affirmative action?

What Would Freud Say?

I thought the days of comparing Obama to starlets were over. Apparently Pat Buchanan didn't get the memo:

Obama, however - like some Hollywood actress seeking sympathy and public approbation with her tell-all biography detailing how she was abused by her father - trolls for popularity with America’s adversaries by reciting for the benefit of the world all the sins his country has allegedly committed.

I mean, seriously, don't most people outgrow "You're a girl" as an insult somewhere around adolescence?

9/11 Occurred When "Mr. Nobody" Was Vice-President?

Pat Buchanan brings us this rather... astonishing observation about Obama:

There is a high probability, if not a near certainty, that, one day, al-Qaeda is going to conduct some spectacular attack on this country or its allies, and Americans will say, “This didn’t happen when people like Cheney were running the show.”

I guess I can accept that, if Buchanan means that Dick Cheney and G.W. were too busy giving away the country to the rich and to various special interest groups to actually be said to be "running the show", but if that's not what he means...

I recognize that when 9/11 is mentioned, some like to pretend that everything that happens under a President's first nine months (or year?) in office didn't occur under that President's "watch", due to it's somehow being attributable to the prior administration. I'm sure they're jumping all over people like David Brooks for falsely attributing the auto and financial industry bailouts to Obama. But even assuming that were an honest argument, Buchanan seems to be attempting to invoke the "Cheney's so tough and mean, nobody would ever do anything like that during 'his watch', while Obama's an effete liberal" line of nonsense so he has no excuse.

The First Amendment... According to Pat Buchanan

Apparently I've been misreading it?

Congress shall make no law impacting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, as long as the religion is Catholicism.....

Buchanan rants,

Consider. In every referendum in 16 states, where homosexual marriage has been on the ballot, majorities ranging from 52 to 86 percent have voted to outlaw it as an absurdity and an abomination.

I'm sure that was the exact ballot language. And I wouldn't be surprised if Buchanan feels the same way about civil rights rulings and anti-miscegenation laws.

For five decades, Americans resisted Godless Communism. If they come to realize they did so to save Godless Capitalism, or Godless Socialism, what happens to loyalty and love of country?

The answer, at least to Pat Bucahanan, seems to be blowing in the wind.

Okay, So What Do We Do?

Pat Buchanan shares his thoughts on the financial crisis:

Who is to blame for the disaster that has befallen us?

Their name is legion.

There are the politicians who bullied banks into making loans the banks knew were bad to begin with and would never have made without threats or the promise of political favors.

There is that den of thieves at Fannie and Freddie who massaged the politicians with campaign contributions and walked away from the wreckage with tens of millions in salaries and bonuses.

There are the idiot bankers who bought up securities backed by sub-prime mortgages and were too indolent to inspect the rotten paper on their books. There are the ratings agencies, like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, who gazed at the paper and declared it to be Grade A prime.

In short, this generation of political and financial elites has proven itself unfit to govern a great nation. What we have is a system failure that is rooted in a societal failure. Behind our disaster lie the greed, stupidity and incompetence of the leadership of a generation.

Does Dr. Obama have the cure for the sickness that ails the Republic?

He is going to borrow and spend trillions more to bring back the good old days, though it was the good old days that brought us to the edge of the abyss into which we have fallen. Then he is going to spend new trillions to give us benefits we do not now have, though the national debt is surging to 100 percent of the Gross National Product, and may reach there by 2011.

A simplified narrative followed by a simplistic judgment. It's a bit like, well, blogging. (Yes, obviously myself included.) Monday morning quarterbacking. Buchanan speaks as if he saw this coming. But of course, he didn't.

It's one of the strange things about this crisis - we're dealing with a scope and scale that defies imagination. What's a trillion dollars? (Is this what you pictured?) It was easy enough for people to look at housing prices as compared to incomes, or housing prices compared to rental prices, and say "This can't continue." But few people had the perspective on the situation to see this as a potentially huge problem - and fewer were willing to speak out about it. And as prescient as those few voices were, I don't recall any that even hinted at the magnitude of the coming collapse. A recession and some housing deflation, sure. But a global financial meltdown?

Buchanan's piece also highlights the other side of the problem - nobody knows what to do, or what will work. The strategy carried over from the Bush Administration is as Buchanan describes - put the same Humpty Dumpty financial system back together, whatever the cost, and hope it stays up on the wall this time. And there are genuine reasons to say, "That might not work," or "These other approaches might be better," but nobody really knows. Hence the conservative approach - return to the status quo ante.

Buchanan doesn't even offer that much - he has criticism, but he doesn't pretend to have a solution. Instead, he imagines a world where credit is harder to obtain (news flash: we're already in that world):

Is Obama willing to speak hard truths?

Is he willing to say that home ownership is for those with sound credit and solid jobs? Is he willing to say that credit, whether for auto loans, or student loans, or consumer purchases, should be restricted to those who have shown the maturity to manage debt — and no others need apply?

Right... we're going to deny student loans to students, because they're young and don't have good job histories. Next solution, please? I'm not sure what to make of Buchanan, period, let alone when he says stuff like this; by his own measure, we created more than enough trouble by having the government meddle in the credit business, so perhaps we shouldn't be moving into an era where the President dictates tighter credit terms. I'm fine with saying that we can't restore the system that led us into this crisis, but what's Buchanan calling for? More regulation? Nationalization?

Perhaps the government should be stepping out of the business of deciding who should have credit, and perhaps that's especially true in relation to any express or implied notion that it will step in and bail out financial firms (including those like FNMA and FDMC) if they screw up. If lenders (and shareholders, and bondholders) know that the risk of loss is truly and entirely theirs, I don't think the President would need to play a role in deciding which citizens are sufficiently responsible to "deserve" a mortgage, car loan or credit card.

McCain's Campaign Failed, Because....

The right hand didn't know what the right hand was doing?

Take it from Charles Krauthammer: Sarah Palin was a huge mistake.

Palin was a mistake ("near suicidal," I wrote on the day of her selection) because she completely undercut McCain's principal case against Obama: his inexperience and unreadiness to lead. And her nomination not only intellectually undermined the readiness argument. It also changed the election dynamic by shifting attention, for days on end, to Palin's preparedness, fitness and experience -- and away from Obama's.

McCain thought he could steal from Obama the "change" issue by running a Two Mavericks campaign. A fool's errand from the very beginning. It defied logic for the incumbent-party candidate to try to take "change" away from the opposition. Election Day exit polls bore that out with a vengeance. Voters seeking the "change candidate" went 89 to 9 for Obama.

No, take it from Pat Buchanan: Sarah Palin is our hero and savior, and perhaps the second coming of, er, Reagan?

Yet by Sept. 10, McCain, thanks to Sarah Palin, whose selection had proven a sensation, had come from eight points behind to take the lead, and Joe Biden was wailing that maybe Hillary would have been a better choice for Obama.

I disagree with both of them, to some degree. Krauthammer exaggerates the import of Palin, and continues to overestimate the "he lacks experience" theme that by the time McCain chose Palin no longer seemed to be resonating with the public. Look at the polls before and after the convention/Palin bubble - McCain was losing on the experience argument. That's not to say it isn't a good argument or a relevant issue, but McCain's campaign apparently recognized that if they didn't introduce a "game changer" they were going to lose. McCain's choice of Palin left conservative elites like Krauthammer tied up in knots, but she was red meat to Pat Buchanan. Palin energized the religious right and helped McCain ensure their turn-out, and provided him with the ability to launch scurrilous attacks on Obama by proxy. In the weeks leading up to the election did you see Obama's support increase? No, it held steady while McCain's support increased - wavering Republicans returned to the fold.

But Palin turned out to be something well short of a net positive. Her lack of experience wasn't so much the issue as her poor performance. That, coupled with the economic crisis, hurt McCain, because it suggested that he lacked judgment. Krauthammer implies that McCain's post-convention/Palin bounce reflected a permanent advantage,

Then Lehman collapsed, and the financial system went off a cliff.

This was not just a meltdown but a panic. For an agonizing few days, there was a collapse of faith in the entire financial system - a run on banks, panicky money-market withdrawals, flights to safety, the impulse to hide one's savings under a mattress.

This did not just have the obvious effect of turning people against the incumbent party, however great or tenuous its responsibility for the crisis. It had the more profound effect of making people seek shelter in government.

Seriously? So Krauthammer is bucking the trend among right-wing pundits and is arguing that the election result gives Obama not only a mandate for massive change, but a mandate to impose socialism? He doesn't like Sarah Palin, but he's clearly been sipping her Kool-Aid. Odd as it seems to say this, for a more rational perspective (albeit one that doesn't survive past the end of the paragraph) let's turn back to Buchanan:

Then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bailout of AIG, McCain’s assertion that the economy was fundamentally sound, and his panicked return to Washington to assist Bush and Hank Paulson push through a wildly unpopular bank bailout - using 700 billion in tax dollars to buy up rubbish paper the idiot bankers had put on their books.

Right up to the point of the collapse, McCain was repeating the mantra, "The fundamentals of the economy are strong." Right up to the point of the collapse, his campaign was dispatching its proxies to savage Obama's economic proposals, to call Obama naive, and to ridicule comparisons between our present financial situation and the great depression. Reality intervened, and how did McCain respond? By trying to convince the people that when he said, "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" he actually meant, "American workers are strong", and then fumbling a suspension of his campaign such that he simultaneously looked manipulative, disingenuous and inept.

How did Palin then hurt him? Not by being inexperienced, and certainly not in her appeal to "the base", but by appearing to undecided voters as further evidence of bad judgment - like the supposed suspension of his campaign, the Palin choice appeared at best to be a cynical manipulation that, despite the McCain camp's spin, put campaign ahead of country. McCain's defense of his choices wasn't "straight talk", and it wasn't mavericky - it was sad and disappointing. He wedded himself to G.W. not so much by his voting record and policy choices, but by his refusal to concede even obvious mistakes and his insistence that his mistakes were in fact good choices.

I'll grant that he couldn't exactly say, "I regret my choice of Sarah Palin" - and it isn't clear that he should have regrets, given that Palin largely did her job by energizing evangelical voters and social conservatives - and perhaps he had dug himself too deep a hole with statements reflecting himself as out-of-touch with the economy, but he didn't have to demean himself or to try to advance lines that, simply put, are ridiculous. Nobody with an ounce of sense is going to believe that living near Russia translates into having foreign policy experience. And if you're going to claim that somebody "understands the energy issues better than anybody I know in Washington, D.C.," you had best make sure she's not going to turn around and stick her foot into her mouth. Repeatedly.

Buchanan believes that McCain could have won the election by acting more like Palin - attacking gay rights, advancing a rigid, pro-life agenda, attacking Obama as supposedly wanting to eliminate any restrictions on abortion, smearing Obama with tales of his association with Ayers and Wright, etc. - I don't think that would have worked, and in fact it might have hurt. There's a reason that the McCain campaign happily launched that brand of attack through Palin, while trying to keep McCain himself above the fray, and my guess is that it's because their internal polling suggested that those attacks would hurt him with swing voters (not to mention demolishing the public perception that he's not hostile to abortion rights). What better evidence of this than Krauthammer's horror at Palin and everything she represents?

I personally would argue that what hurt McCain the most with swing voters was his overt efforts to appeal to the Buchananite/evangelical wing of the Republican Party. You can still easily find people who lament that they weren't able to vote for the McCain who ran in 2000, and how they wished that guy had been in the race. That guy apparently concluded early on that he couldn't win his party's nomination without making serious concessions to religious and social conservatives, and apparently later concluded (probably correctly) that it was more important to "turn out the base" - have those reliably Republican voters come out and support him on election day - than to try to hold or win over the middle. Krauthammer writes,

McCain thought he could steal from Obama the "change" issue by running a Two Mavericks campaign. A fool's errand from the very beginning.

But he misses the point that the leading factor, and perhaps the only factor, that made McCain a serious contender in the race was the distance he had historically emphasized between his own positions and those of the Republican Party. Whether you believe that to be reality or myth, that McCain - the McCain of 2000 - could legitimately declare himself a candidate of change. The reminted McCain running in 2008 could not. And he lost.
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Update (via lies.com):