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Buchanan endorses Bush
Unbelievable. Buchanan spends three years smearing Bush and his neocon advisors as quasi traitors who launched the U.S. into a ruinous major war solely for the sake of “Israel and oil,” and now this same Buchanan endorses Bush for the presidency. As I realized many years ago, Buchanan is not a serious or responsible person, and certainly no leader. He’s a maverick, a kid having fun, a bully on a lark, taking whatever position and striking whatever attitude he feels like taking from one minute to the next. He supports terrorists and invokes hatred of Israel one minute, and then acts like a prudent member of the establishment the next. He publishes a cover cartoon of Uncle Sam as a psychotic murderer attacking the world one minute, and expresses concern for traditional patriotism the next. This is not a man of principle. This is a man of impulse, and many of his impulses are not only grossly wrong-headed but wicked. He says that while Bush and Kerry are equally wrong on many things, Bush is at least right on sovereignty, taxes, morality, and judges, while Kerry is right on nothing. True. But, by Buchanan’s lights, how can that be a sufficient reason to vote to continue a presidency that Buchanan himself has continuously smeared as evil and treasonous and in the control of anti-American Jews whose only agenda is is to manipulate America and kill American boys for Israel’s advantage? An additional reason Buchanan gives for endorsing Bush is that, if Kerry becomes president, the neocons would be able to blame Kerry for the ensuing disaster in Iraq, protecting themselves from accountability. On another point, Buchanan says of TAC’s own warnings against the war: “Invade and we inherit our own West Bank of 23 million Iraqis, unite Islam against us, and incite imams from Morocco to Malaysia to preach jihad against America. So we wrote, again and again.” To the best of my recollection (and I read all of TAC’s early issues), this is not true. TAC did not make the argument that we shouldn’t invade because we would end up with an ongoing terror war in Iraq. TAC argued that this war was a crazy neocon scheme to protect Israel and to create an American empire. TAC’s main concern was not that this U.S. imperial adventure would get miserably bogged down in an Iraqi “West Bank,” but that it would succeed, leading the U.S. to interfere in one Mideast country after another. And even if some isolated article at TAC did make such an argument about an Iraqi “West Bank,” that was distinctly a secondary or tertiary note in TAC’s coverage. In fact, it was the Anti-War Party’s focus on attacking the supposed evil motives of the war proponents, instead of discussing the pros and cons of the war itself, that deflected much of the public debate away from the latter. The upshot was that the fatal poverty of the debate, the general failure of everyone involved in the debate to think seriously enough about the after-Saddam situation that we would face, was not just due to the Bush administration, but to their anger-fueled critics on the Anti-War Right, whose ad hominem attacks required war supporters to keep responding to those attacks, rather than devote all our available energies to thinking about the war itself.
If any reader knows of articles in TAC that prove me wrong, please send the links to me. Email entry |