Word: patting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT LIBERALS ARE AT FAULT FOR nearly everything that is wrong with the world today, from welfare to your cat's fur balls. But you would think that liberals could not be blamed for Pat Buchanan. Yet some conservatives have even tried to pin the rise of this fiery right-winger on liberals. They note that Buchanan bases some of his screwy ideas on the work of an obscure economist, whose name he picked up from an article by the liberal journalist James Fallows. They observe that Buchanan's concerns about layoffs and middle-class insecurity (though...
...Washington," for "Congress,'' for "elites" was an overt--and brilliantly successful--part of Speaker Newt Gingrich's Long March strategy for taking over the House. More generally, it became a reflexive part of the Republican political language. Sitting on cnn's Crossfire for six years, most of them opposite Pat Buchanan, I heard this stuff night after night, and not just from Pat. No Republican ever interrupted another Republican's diatribe against the institutions of government with the warning, "Let's not be anti-institutional here...
...target scapegoats and misuse patriotism for cheap political advantage. They're right. But do they by any chance remember the sneery majoritarianism of George Bush's campaign of 1988--the one all about saluting the flag and prison furloughs? Maybe they even remember back to 1968 and 1972, when Pat Buchanan helped Richard Nixon start this fine Republican tradition...
...delicious to hear Rush Limbaugh, of all people, explaining that Pat Buchanan is not a "Republican" at all--he's a "populist." And Rush evidently means this to be a criticism! Buchanan's populist demagoguery, deplorable as it is, has had the healthy effect of separating the Republicans from the populists, and of exposing the Republican Party's own populism as a sham. When institutions they and their traditional business allies control are at stake, it is suddenly "anti-American" to be "anti-institutional...
...popular anger built largely on amorphous complaints would be satisfied by largely symbolic solutions. The illusion of unhappiness would be addressed by the illusion of change. The Republican leadership must have thought so too, but they and I were wrong. The genie won't go back into the bottle. Pat Buchanan, now tearing apart the Republican Party, is the genie's revenge...