Pat routinely criticizes the actions of civil rights advocates when they’re black or gay, and never posts anything when blacks or gays are killed or brutalized in the US. I’m not sure how to cite that.
The problem is the attitudes of “Middle America” are those of one, large but no-longer-majority faction. There is no entitlement for those to be the establishment that is to apply to us all.
When Pat wonders out loud whether the election of a consummate insider can be the true result of an election in a “year of the outsider”, he is of course distorting the nature of the process. In the primary Hillary and Donald won, but only among those who bothered to show up, with the majority of America having NOT bothered. In the general, the race will be decided by state-by-state votes of those who bother to show up. So hell yeah you CAN get the “how could it be Candidate X won? nobody I know voted for them!” phenomenon and it does not mean anything went wrong.
And yes, Pat is a believer in “cooling the streets”. He wants someone on the R side to come into office who will appease the RW and make them feel less besieged, while making the LW feel they need to switch to a “preserve the gains” position and stop asking for more. My problem with that is that a lot of the current high level of agitation derives exactly from years of first NeoCon then Tea Party candidates promising to do something to steer the nation to the Right and failing to deliver anything but profits to their backers. What happens if an R President comes into office and decides to try to cool the streets, but then 20 or 30% of Middle America Common Clay of the New West types still show up demanding where the hell is their damn wall, how come they can still hear a call to prayer from a local mosque, what is an out lesbian doing in command of Fort Jackson and why haven’t you annulled every Obama-era law?
It seems you are unhappy with human comfort. The far left still hangs on to its hardcore religious origins that viewed any human enjoyment as a sin. Fossil fuels have led to human comfort and flourishing, so they must be the devil!
Pat is riffing on Donald’s “rigged” theme. He never suggests the vote itself will be rigged. He only does typical Pat stuff, talking about how the establishment is allied against Trump and “Middle America”.
I didn’t say Pat was correct. I said I understood his viewpoint. On its face, there is no sign of Pat’s “hope” for social upheaval. That interpretation has to be read into the text.
Look I see that this issue is really your “thing” and you’re delighted that you can bash Buchanan over and over again for irrelevant positions. That being said, I have no interest in discussing the climate issue here. Start a thread titled “Fossil Fuels were a negative development for mankind” and I may participate.
I agree. Pat grossly overestimates the size and homogeneity of his “Middle America”.
Good one. I forget that there’s a hierarchy of acceptable violence for those like Pat – white on black or straight on gay violence doesn’t get a peep from him, but a Muslim? They just crossed Pat’s line!
Like I said, you must had found a sale of straw men at Costco.
But here you also demonstrate that you are once again an ignorant of what I posted before, it is a false dilemma argument what you are going on here. Most of the changes proposed were explained even by conservative scientists like Richard Alley. None of them lead one to conclude that we should end civilization as we know it, nor forgo many modern creature comforts.
And that is as unconvincing as Pat “the environmentalist”. Unless he has evidence what he is going for continues to be reprehensible.
On that you are also wrong, it is relevant as this also has a connection with the Syrian refugees and Pat Buchanan is also a “champion” for opposing doing the human thing. The overall point to me is that Pat Buchanan has demonstrated that he is a crank magnet, just like Trump. His gross ignorance does lead him to fall for more, as in his apologies to Hitler and the confederate cause.
Easy to misinterpret that as meaning that the process is rigged don’t ya think?
Your take, being fluent in Buchananese, is that a Clinton victory will be the result of “the establishment”, inclusive of GOP leadership, protecting their hegemony, in service of creating “endless migrations of Third World peoples who consume more tax dollars than they generate, and who will soon swamp the Republicans’ coalition” so long as it also helps the “preservation of their perks, privileges and power.” That establishment will achieve that goal by convincing people to vote against Trump though, not by rigging the actual vote … and getting a majority to vote one way over the other is somehow very unfair, or even evil.
Given your fluency in Buchananese can you please translate the following?
'Cause honestly the words are English but it makes no sense in the language. If we can’t succeed by having more votes tell us how to succeed by having more votes?
The only way I can imagine parsing it in the context is to be saying that since these people do not actually have the votes to accomplish what he thinks are their goals (you know, meaning they are not the majority) then they are being left with no option but violence.
BTW here is the context of that JFK quote. The irony of a speech celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Alliance for Progress being used in defense of xenophobia and isolationism and hate is not missed.
Yes, there are personal reasons too why I dislike Pat Buchanan. Like Cardinal Ximenes could say:
*There are FOUR! Four infamies from Pat, among them are climate change denial… Hitler apologies… being a Confederate Apologist… and Lying about American election fraud to incite rebellion… and defending butchers of priests, peasants and work leaders in El Salvador… FIVE! *
The guy was a Neo-Nazi with a history of mental health issues. If you are going to claim that he is representative of the Brexit movement, you’ll have to do better than that little bit of snark.
Nobody needs to understand Pat Buchanan’s worldview the way you are characterizing it – which is a questionable characterization at best.
We can plainly read what he’s written, and we can understand it in the context of the current race. What he has opined in the past is irrelevant. He’s writing about the present, and describing in ominous language that Hillary Clinton’s victory would not be legitimate in the eyes of some (apparently including him). You can try to phrase however the hell you want, but that’s what it comes down to: should we accept the outcome of a democratic election or not? I think we should. A majority of voters who vote for the winning candidate would probably believe the same.
The natural counter-question is, why should we not respect the will of a majority of those who vote? The fact that conservatives are a “marginalized” minority that is somehow overlooked by smug progressives and centrists who have hijacked their country doesn’t invalidate the election. Maybe conservatives should accept the fact that in the marketplace of ideas…nobody is buying any of the shit that they’re selling. There’s that ya know.
I’m old enough to know how authoritarians do see the world, and talking aloud about electoral fraud is one common component of right wingers in many places of the world when they do not get what they want at the ballot box.
Past Republican administrations whitewashed many military strongmen in Latin America and the Coup d’états or real electoral frauds that got them in power, and Pat Buchanan was there making the lime paint.
Seems to me that it is pertinent to mention that Pat learned the wrong lessons from Latin America and remembers the “good old days” with glee. Of course those ideas were supposed to be used elsewhere; but paleo conservatives (and many Trump supporters) like Pat seem to ominously want to apply them also in the USA because he does realize that the chances of strong rule for the groups of “true Americans” like him, in his mind, are going away.
I see these results have been confirmed by several research teams. Party affiliation can be guessed rather accurately with a single brain-scan reading when subject is shown a “disgusting” image!
Although many of the articles are careful to assign value to conservative cognition (
), conservatives generally reject these studies, unread — not surprising since it is liberals who embrace critical thinking and the scientific method.
I attempted to post a much longer response yesterday but it was so long that my rebuttal got timed out and for whatever reason, I couldn’t submit it.
Anyhow, the bold part of the response is one of the things I was going to bring up.
This isn’t really a new phenomenon but rather the continuation of something I’ve been observing since 1992 when Bill Clinton, the draft-dodging, dope-smoking anti-war protester turned Yale lawyer was somehow astonishingly elected over a sitting president who was a WWII veteran, an anti-communist stalwart, and who had just 18 months earlier had one of the highest approval ratings of any president in modern history. I remember even then, conservatives just couldn’t accept the fact that voters had gone democratic. In their minds, either the liberal media had successfully brainwashed a new generation of voters or Clinton was an evil anti-christ who could fool millions of people into voting for him. This sentiment is no doubt what fueled the endless investigations and his ultimate impeachment proceedings. Republicans for the past 25 years have been losing in the marketplace of ideas and rather than trying to innovate and reach across demographic groups, they’ve resorted to doubling down on their self-righteousness and tried to find ways to overturn votes, delegitimize political opposition, and limit democratic voter participation. Now faced with what could be one of the most significant defeats in recent memory, the republican party is taking their fight to new and more dangerous extremes. Some are now openly suggesting that the outcome is only valid if it represents their worldview.
