# Pat Buchanan **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 7, 2009, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169 "2009-01-07T00:58:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/1 "2009-01-07T00:58:25Z")
I think this is a debate and not an IMHO. It may drift between the two. What think ye of Pat Buchanan? He comes from a long line of cave dwellers (natives of DC who are not political), I like that. He worked as Nixon’s speechwriter. That’s got to be a black mark. I gave him full snaps when he stood up to defend John Demjanjuk, an American sent to Israel to stand trial for WWII war crimes. When Demjanjuk was acquitted, I was impressed that one guy had the balls to stand up for what is right. But now I read new evidence indicates Demjanjuk is in fact a war criminal. Buchanan has been a doctrinaire Conservative. He opposed Bush’s war and torture. He has his beliefs and sticks to them. This evening he is on TV arguing that guy from Illinois out to be seated in the Senate. Sometimes he is wrong, but he seem honest in his beliefs. What do you think? ---
**Author:** ![LavenderBlue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e95f7d/32.png) [@LavenderBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LavenderBlue)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/2 "2009-01-07T01:18:04Z")
I think he’s an unrepentant racist and anti-semite who has openly printed holocaust denial nonsense in his columns. I do think he should not be on the air at all. > **[Roobet - Top 5 Best Online Games, Tested and Reviewed for 2022](https://reformjudaismmag.net/roobet/)** > > You start the new week at Roobet Casino with up to 150 free spins. This bonus offer has the following special features:... ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/3 "2009-01-07T01:30:34Z")
Really? I just read your cite, but I do not see a quote of Buchanan saying anything anti-Semitic. I do not see a direct quote of him denying the Holocaust. I am willing to be convinced. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/4 "2009-01-07T01:33:41Z")
I think he’s a fair representative and fitting leader of the [paleoconservative](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoconservative) movement – populists, traditionalist, nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-big-business, anti-big-government, isolationist, anti-foreign-wars; distinguishable from the religious right (see the [Constitution Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_Party_(United_States))) mainly in emphasis (and in differing positions on support for Israel – Buchanan’s against it, Christian Zionists are for it). Ideological descendants of the [Know-Nothings](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know-Nothings) (who would have shunned Buchanan because he’s Irish Catholic), the [Populists,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populist_Party_(United_States)) and the WWII-era [America Firsters](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee) – for whom Buchanan named the [political party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Party_(1944)) he formed out of his faction from the [Reform Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Party_of_the_United_States_of_America) split. And of the [John Birch Society,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society) I shouldn’t wonder. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/5 "2009-01-07T01:36:48Z")
Yes, I would say he is a Paleoconservative. In fact, he may be the last of the breed. But an anti-Semitic? News to me. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/6 "2009-01-07T01:39:42Z")
> [@LavenderBlue](#): > > I think he’s an unrepentant racist Not that this is conclusive, but he picked a black woman (and a socialist at that!) as his running mate one of the times he ran for President. ---
**Author:** ![magellan01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@magellan01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magellan01)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/7 "2009-01-07T01:41:51Z")
> [@LavenderBlue](#): > > I think he’s an unrepentant racist and anti-semite who has openly printed holocaust denial nonsense in his columns. I do think he should not be on the air at all. > > [http://www.reformjudaismmag.net/1096ca.html](http://www.reformjudaismmag.net/1096ca.html) Translation: if anyone does not ascribe to the opinions of the most strident jews regarding everything nazi, he or she is nazi sympathizer and apologist.:rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/8 "2009-01-07T01:43:02Z")
> [@Paul in Saudi](#): > > Yes, I would say he is a Paleoconservative. In fact, he may be the last of the breed. But an anti-Semitic? News to me. [Judge for yourself.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan#Accusations_of_Anti-Semitism) And, “last?” Paleocons form a mass-based constituency, I should think. Not a majority or plurality, but significant. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/9 "2009-01-07T01:44:14Z")
> [@magellan01](#): > > Translation: if anyone does not ascribe to the opinions of the most strident jews regarding everything nazi, he or she is nazi sympathizer and apologist.:rolleyes: William F. Buckley rather famously wrote a long and fairly pompous (but hey, it’s WFB) piece (no one really had asked him to do so) weighing all the evidence and concluding that PJB was in fact guilty of anti-Semitism. Not everyone who read it was convinced, but it didn’t do Pat’s reputation any favors. ---
**Author:** ![LavenderBlue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e95f7d/32.png) [@LavenderBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LavenderBlue)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/10 "2009-01-07T01:45:45Z")
In his own words: > [@](#): > > [http://www.holocaust-history.org/~jamie/buchanan/](http://www.holocaust-history.org/~jamie/buchanan/) > > Since the war, 1,600 medical papers have been written on “The Psychological and Medical Effects of the Concentration Camps on Holocaust Survivors.” > > This so-called “Holocaust Survivor Syndrome” involves “group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.” Reportedly, half the 20,000 survivor testimonies in Jerusalem are considered “unreliable,” not to be used in trials. > > Finally, the death engine. During the war, the underground government of the Warsaw Ghetto reported to London that the Jews of Treblinka were being electrocuted and steamed to death. > > The Israeli court, however, concluded the murder weapon for 850,000 was the diesel engine from a Soviet tank which drove its exhaust into the death chamber. All died in 20 minutes, Finkelstein swore in 1945. > > The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody. In 1988, 97 kids, trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, D.C., tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes. > > Demjanjuk’s weapon of mass murder cannot kill. That’s holocaust denial right there plain and simple. Mocking holocaust survivors is disgusting. > [@](#): > > [Is Pat Buchanan Anti-Semitic? - Newsweek](http://www.newsweek.com/id/124012) > > Strangely, Buckley makes little of Buchanan’s attitudes toward the Holocaust and Nazi war criminals. Last year Buchanan wrote that it was impossible for 850,000 Jews to be killed by diesel exhaust fed into the gas chamber at Treblinka. When George Will challenged him about it last week on TV (it is, alas, all too possible), he ducked. Buchanan’s long battle with Nazi-hunters is shy of loony but still conspicuous. In 1983 he criticized the U.S. government for expressing regret over its postwar protection of Klaus Barbie. In 1985, he advocated restoring the citizenship of Arthur Rudolph, an ex-Nazi rocket scientist accused of employing slave labor at a V-2 plant. In 1987, he lobbied to stop deportation of Karl Linnas, accused of atrocities in Estonia. He could well be right that John Demjanjuk was wrongly accused of being Treblinka’s “Ivan the Terrible.” (Newly released Soviet documents suggest he may have been merely a camp guard.) But this respect for civil liberties is suspiciously selective. An ACLU man, he ain’t. Buchanan is a hardliner on all accused criminals-except Nazis. He’s written a lot of profoundly ugly things for a very long time. In defense of segregation in the 1950’s era Washington DC where he grew up: > [@](#): > > [FAIR — Page 2553 — FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.](http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2553) > > There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The ‘negroes’ of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." (Right from the Beginning, Buchanan’s 1988 autobiography, p. 131) William F. Buckley wrote a long essay reproduced in a [book](http://www.amazon.com/Search-Anti-Semitism-William-F-Buckley/dp/0826405835) in which, “he reached the pained conclusion that his fellow conservative Patrick Buchanan, the reactionary former presidential candidate, is anti-Semitic.” ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/11 "2009-01-07T01:46:48Z")
He is interesting and I always pay attention when I hear him speak. Most specially, he is very incisive in examining topics wherein he has no particular stake. And his avuncular crush on Rachel Maddow is perfectly _adorable!_ ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/12 "2009-01-07T01:49:28Z")
(Reference Paleoconservatives) Never meet any at Lodge. ===If Bill Buckley says he is an Anti-Semite, I am convinced. Thank you all.=== ---
**Author:** ![LavenderBlue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e95f7d/32.png) [@LavenderBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LavenderBlue)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/13 "2009-01-07T01:50:04Z")
> [@magellan01](#): > > Translation: if anyone does not ascribe to the opinions of the most strident jews regarding everything nazi, he or she is nazi sympathizer and apologist.:rolleyes: Did you read the article before commenting on it? > [@](#): > > [http://www.reformjudaismmag.net/1096ca.html](http://www.reformjudaismmag.net/1096ca.html) > > Nor has he revealed the source of his phony evidence disputing the well-documented fact that diesel exhaust was one of the methods used to gas thousands of Jews at Treblinka. “The problem is,” Buchanan wrote in the March 17, 1990 column, “diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.” How did he know? “The Environmental Protection Agency never requires emission inspections of diesel cars or trucks. In 1988, 97 youths, trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, DC tunnel, while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes. [Therefore] Demjanjuk’s weapon of mass murder cannot kill…” > > Buchanan provided no evidence to substantiate his claim that the conditions of the trapped children in a tunnel simulated a death-camp gas chamber. In fact, he exaggerated the severity of the train tunnel incident to suit his purposes. According to the original Washington Post story, “5th Graders’ Trip Turns to Terror in Train Tunnel” (May 13, 1988), “one [not two] of the train’s engines continued to run for several [not 45] minutes” (emphasis added). Buchanan neglected to tell his readers that “two [of the pupils] appeared to be ‘seriously affected,’ to the point of suffering nausea or vomiting.” Thus, as George F. Will observed in a Newsweek essay (March 4, 1996), “even though the tunnel was open at both ends, some children were made sick… By saying it [carbon monoxide] cannot kill, and by saying survivors’ testimonies are unreliable, Buchanan abets the principal neo-Nazi obsession-Holocaust denial.” George F. Will is hardly (as you so quaintly put it) a, “strident Jew.” ---
**Author:** ![magellan01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@magellan01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magellan01)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/14 "2009-01-07T01:51:10Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > [Judge for yourself.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan#Accusations_of_Anti-Semitism) And, “last?” Paleocons form a mass-based constituency, I should think. Not a majority or plurality, but significant. Just read it. Don’t see it. Do you? Anyone? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/15 "2009-01-07T02:47:22Z")
One thing you should not mistake him for is a stupid or uneducated man. He is neither. But I gotta say, he makes my skin crawl sometimes. He isn’t overtly racist (who is these days?), but much of what he says about race is tinged with racism. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/16 "2009-01-07T03:26:00Z")
Buchanan has a soft spot for Hitler that just seems bizarre in that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in the early 20s and it just got worse from there. There doesn’t seem to be any room to argue that a Hitler apologist isn’t nuts. However, Buchanan will say some things that nobody else will say that are not so nearly offensive. Somebody mentioned Demjanjuk. Everyone is presumed innocent. Blagojevich, Libby, Nixon, Eichman, etc. Very few in the press will stand up for this principle. Even if Buchanan did it only for Demjanjuk (and even if he was guilty) that deserves some recognition, even if he didn’t do it for the right reasons. Somebody gives Buchanan a platform to say these things. And he doesn’t lie about what his opinions are to suit the party talking points of the day. He says what he really thinks. He doesn’t think America should be an Empire. I agree. He is willing to be critical of Israeli policy. I agree (but I can also agree with Israeli policy when it is right.) But we get back to that blind spot about Hitler. Hitler was arguably the most evil man in human history. He is unarguably the second choice for most people if they happen to hate Stalin or Mao or Vald the Impaler or whoever more. There is no getting around the fact that anyone who paid close attention to Hitler (Churchill was one) knew he was evil as soon as they started paying attention. To not know it after the fact, in hindsight, is almost to completely deny the existence of causation as a concept. Pat Buchanan is not enough of a philosophical thinker to even try to go down that road. Ultimately, I don’t reject a position based on what side Buchanan comes down on, I just wish there was someone else with less baggage (like the late Buckley?) spouting it. That Buchanan is the leading figure on the right for US non-interventionism is an unfortunate state of affairs for those of us on the left. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/17 "2009-01-07T03:29:41Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > One thing you should not mistake him for is a stupid or uneducated man. He is neither. But I gotta say, he makes my skin crawl sometimes. He isn’t overtly racist (who is these days?), but much of what he says about race is tinged with racism. Especially in [this book.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_West) He never says it in so many words but it’s clear enough he’s not just concerned about the decline of Western “culture.” ---
**Author:** ![magellan01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@magellan01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magellan01)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/18 "2009-01-07T04:13:05Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Especially in [this book.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_West) He never says it in so many words but it’s clear enough he’s not just concerned about the decline of Western “culture.” What is he concerned with, in your estimation? ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/19 "2009-01-07T04:17:23Z")
Take your pick. There is hardly a group in America that Pat Buchanan has not exhibited [bigoted views](http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2553) about, excepting white Christian males: \*"Buchanan, who opposed virtually every civil rights law and court decision of the last 30 years, published FBI smears of Martin Luther King Jr. as his own editorials in the St. Louis Globe Democrat in the mid-1960s. “We were among Hoover’s conduits to the American people,” he boasted (Right from the Beginning, p. 283)…In a memo to President Nixon, Buchanan suggested that “integration of blacks and whites – but even more so, poor and well-to-do – is less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction, as the incapable are placed consciously by government side by side with the capable.” (Washington Post, 1/5/92)… Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan – despite protests – to visit Germany’s Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS troops were buried. At a White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly reminded Jewish leaders that they were “Americans first” – and repeatedly scrawled the phrase “Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews” in his notebook. Buchanan was credited with crafting Ronald Reagan’s line that the SS troops buried at Bitburg were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” (New York Times, 5/16/85; New Republic, 1/22/96) After Cardinal O’Connor criticized anti-Semitism during the controversy over construction of a convent near Auschwitz, Buchanan wrote: “If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as indicative of our submission, it is mistaken… …the Buchanan '96 campaign’s World Wide Web site included an article blaming the death of White House aide Vincent Foster on the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad – and alleging that Foster and Hillary Clinton were Mossad spies…The campaign removed the article after its existence was reported by a Jewish on-line news service; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2/21/96.)”\* His views on gays and women are similarly loathsome. Put these attitudes together with his extreme political philosophy and it’s amazing he has crawled into some vestige of respectability among right-wingers. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2009, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169/20 "2009-01-07T04:23:11Z")
Hunter S Thompson liked the man just fine, and that’s good enough for me. He’s actually come out against neo-cons, saying they hijacked what was in the 1970s actually a decent Republican agenda; this has been linked to before in other threads, but I believe his Wikipedia entry mentions this. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pat-buchanan/480169.md?page=2)