Word: buchananism
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That's a defense that can end up sounding like "I'm not a bigot, but I play one on TV." If Buchanan has spent a lifetime as a polemicist, however, he's been a nationally prominent one, meaning someone whose most indigestible sentiments have still mostly stopped short of, well, extremism. But how short? The question becomes more than academic now that he is a serious presidential contender. When he derides "the worship of democracy" or calls Martin Luther King "immoral, evil and a demagogue," is Buchanan just pushing the edge of the envelope, or is he tearing...
...Buchanan's reputation as an unblushing hard-liner on just about everything dates back to his days as a Nixon White House aide. "He's the reverse of most politicians, who are intensely political with trimmings of ideology,'' says Nixon's White House special consultant Leonard Garment. "He's intensely ideological with a trimming of politics." When Buchanan returned to the White House in 1985 as director of communications for Ronald Reagan, he was the same, only more so. "I hadn't encountered anyone like Pat since I had to deal with the White Citizens' Councils in my days...
That's the gist of the argument when it comes to Buchanan and anti-Semitism. As he pointed out last week, some of his best friends are Jewish. And Buchanan has condemned anti-Semitism, once comparing it to pornography. Yet there are times when he's not averse to showing some cleavage, enough to lead William F. Buckley Jr., the paterfamilias of modern conservatism, to conclude four years ago that "it is impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge [of anti-Semitism...
...another way, if you were a happily acknowledged anti-Semite, you might not have a record so different from Buchanan's accumulated words and positions. As New York's Mayor Giuliani last week complained, Buchanan was an ardent defender of Karl Linnas, the convicted Nazi war criminal, even trying to stop his 1987 deportation from New York to the Soviet Union. His tireless defense of accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk was partly justified. There's substantial evidence that Demjanjuk was not the Butcher of Treblinka he was accused of being in an Israeli court. But he was indisputably...
Then there's the Holocaust. In a 1990 newspaper column, Buchanan didn't hesitate to say that people who survived the Nazi death camps suffer from "group fantasies of martyrdom." He even tried his hand at Holocaust revisionism, arguing that diesel-engine exhaust could not have killed so many Jews at Treblinka. Hitler? A mass murderer, Buchanan admits in a 1977 piece, but a man of "great courage" and "a soldier's soldier." If it matters to you that you don't leave the impression that you are carrying a torch for the Fuhrer, that's a judgment you frame...