I catch the McLaughlin Group when I can. Have for a Very Long Time. I’ve come to hold Buchanan out as a guy with whom I disagree on most things, but with whom I believe I could have a snifter of something and talk civilly and endlessly about whatever.
But he turned my stomach at about 11:52 on the latest episode by heaping praise on “Tucker [Carlson] and Sean [Hannity] and Laura [Ingraham].”
This felt, to me, like a scaled-down version of the CFSG awarding the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh – like praising Charles Manson for his ‘powerful contributions to popular culture and the zeitgeist.’
So … for that reason … fuck him with a stick. Happy New Year, Pat. I hope this won’t alter the results of your upcoming colonoscopy !
I used to watch the McLaughlin Group (a long damned time ago), and there was something disarming about seeing those people, with all their different points of view, talking among themselves. Also, Pat Buchanan had this silly little scrunched-face giggle he would sometimes do that made it hard to hate him.
But he clearly went from “Someone I really, really disagree with” to “Unhinged hateful loon” a long time ago. As in “‘defending Hitler’ unhinged hateful lunacy”, which a number of us Pitted him for back in 2009. (Boy, time flies!)
Buchanan’s views are just awful, but he’s one of the most, if not the most, self-aware awful-politics person I’ve ever known. He knows Trump lost; he knows Trump is dishonest, corrupt, incomptent, misogynistic, etc., but he has a nigh-Dominionist view on the country, and will openly support anything that helps move us towards white Christian rule. And I don’t think he’d deny it. Unlike Sean/Laura/Tucker/etc., he doesn’t pretend his opponents are radical and unAmerican, or that his allies are all honest and decent.
Buchanan’s kind of the last of a dying breed who may well have made a good living from peddling his well-honed brand of bullshit, but you could believe that he actually believed his own bullshit, whether or not you found it or him repugnant and deplorable.
And there was something just a touch paradoxically respectable about that.
In a way, I’d like to say the same quality exists in Trump – what British comedian, Russelll Brand, referred to as,
That’s why I think Donald Trump is so successful. I’m telling you, there’s something very authentic about that man. I mean, the geezer seems like a cunt, but I don’t think he’s putting it on.
But Trump and his ilk have that certain je ne sais quoi (a good many extraordinarily literate people have tried to capture Trump’s awfulness in words – including here – but no matter how precise and compelling the characterizations, they must always – by necessity – fall short) that makes them extraordinarily punchable and inter-generationally dangerous.
I never found Buchanan to be a leading man in the endless shit show du jour. I could have hated him a thousand times for a half-million things he said and did, and even who he was, but I don’t remember even once wanting to punch him and chuckle while hyenas bit off his scrotum.
Which maybe makes him even more dangerous than the current Ship of Fools. Buchanan has tended to fly intellectually under the radar most of the time, for decades.
I recall reading an article that said that turning the Republican Party in to a fascist, white suotrmacist party represents a moral and intellectual victory for Buchanan.
There is one thing I respect Pat Buchanan for, and it’s that he didn’t breed.
He realized early in his career and marriage that he was headed towards a career that he felt would not be compatible with fatherhood, and had a vasectomy.
Scroll over to the 54-minute mark and imagine yourself in a packed college movie theater. People booed, and then laughed uproariously when they saw the guy with the cigarette.
And a second spoiler: If you want to watch the whole movie, the filmmakers REALLY hated Jerry Brown.
Way to play heads-up ball, there, Pat ! Unfortunately, it seems his sister, Bay – who later came out as gay – had three children. The bloodline may continue after all (though her children may very well all be perfectly lovely people).
Thanks for the vid recco. I’ll add it to the list !
IIRC, Buchanan was the beneficiary of the fucked-up butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida that threw the 2000 election to Bush, upon which he acknowledged that Gore was probably supposed to be the real winner.
The background: Buchanan ran with the Reform Party. All those voters who meant to vote for Gore but didn’t insert their ballots into the machine quite right accidentally voted for Buchanan instead. This gave Buchanan more votes than there were registered Reform Party voters in the whole county (at the expense of Gore). When reporters asked Buchanan about this, he admitted that didn’t look right.
Sort of, but not exactly. It had nothing to do with hanging chads. The butterfly ballot vote was fucked up beyond all possible repair, and no amount of re-counting could possibly have corrected that.
The call for re-counts based on the possibility of hanging chads was a desperation move. There was never any serious chance that it could change the outcome.
The butterfly ballot was a systematic error – that is, it happened in such a way that the mistaken votes were all in one direction: Votes for Buchanan that the voters apparently meant for Gore. In contrast, the hanging chad errors were random: Each one, individually, could just as well have favored Bush or Gore. In the aggregate, all the votes that were changed because of the re-counts would tend to 50% favor Bush and 50% favor Gore, roughly, so there was never really much chance that a very substantial number of net votes would change.
