Pat Buchanan Is Writing Horrible Misleading Books Again

As a Republican I get tired of having Pat Buchanan Associated with me. Especially since he ran against the Republican nominee for President not too long ago.

Anyway Buchanan has another wacky book out. Please go see Victor Hansen's Patrick J. Buchanan—Pseudo-Historian, Very Real Dissimulator ,and Christopher Hitchens's very good piece A War Worth Fighting.

Pat Buchanan constantly flirts with the some of the most wacky in the Paleo Conservative movement. Many of Pat's book in my view are not aimed toward giving a recount of History but aimed at a political agenda. Hitchens , before he takes him to the woodshed on his "facts", gets to the heart of the matter:

Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He's already opened with the statement, "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." The tropes are familiar—a loss of will and confidence, a collapse of the desire to reproduce with sufficient vigor, a preference for hedonism over the stern tasks of rulership and dominion and pre-eminence. It all sounds oddly … Churchillian.

The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan's especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for "wars of choice."

This term has enjoyed a recent vogue because of the opposition to the war in Iraq, an opposition in which Buchanan has played a vigorous role. Descending as he does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America First movement, which looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain cosmopolitan lobby behind FDR's willingness to involve the United States in global war, Buchanan is the most trenchant critic of what he considers our fondest national illusion, and his book has the feel and stamp of a work that he has been readying all his life.