Now This How the Right Neocons Treat its Their Wingnuts

Stephen Green refers to Pat Buchanan as a Nazi Apologist and fisks Buchanan down to his shorts on World War Two history.

Green:

These are historical facts. Buchanan knows them. He's hoping you don't.

My thoughts exactly.

BTW, the Greens are going to be parents at the end of the year; no vodka for the Missus for a bit. Congratulations!

(Thanks to Instapundit)

UPDATE:

Maybe history will just rename WWII as the Fifty Years War, 1939 to 1989.

--one of Stephen's readers

Comments

[Steven J. Kelso Sr.]

Is it just me, or does Pat seem to be moving to the left?

[Steve]

I work in bars and I here the same things said and counter-said the exact same way. Is there anyway to stop something from just going around and around and around?

[DarkStar]

Did "The Right" treat Charles Murray as a wing nut?

No.

Did "The Right" treat Jesse Helms as a wing nut?

No.

Did "The Right" treat Bob Jones, III(?) as a wing nut?

No.

[baldilocks]

Is the wording precise enough now, DarkStar?

[Aakash]

I think that Mr. Green's entry is quite misleading, and he is way over the top in his attack on the author. This blog entry is the best one that I've see so far, about this issue.

Pat's position on WWII has been that once we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war against us, we had to defeat the Axis powers. But I think that he has also said that we should have avoided an alliance with the Soviet Union.... And that if Britain and France had not guaranteed Polish boundaries, then Germany would have attacked the Soviet Union, which would have been of benefit to the Allied Powers. He asserts that it would have been better for us to have entered WWII after Germany and the Soviet Union had decimated each other.

(This is just an explanation... I am not taking a personal position on these issues.)

For more information on this, from a balanced perspective, here is a book review from the Brothers Judd, and one from Professor John Pafford, and an article by William F. Buckley.

[DarkStar]

*ROTFL*

Thinks....

I must admit, I find the neo-con vs. paleo-con to be a con. It's just a justification for self described conservatives to abandon standard conservative principals.

Thinks....

[Jamie]

I gotta give Buchanan the benefit of the doubt here. He doesn't say anywhere that I've read that we should never have attacked Germany. Obviously, they declared war on us.

What he's saying is that we shouldn't have agreed to cede countries to the Russians. And he's right.

Green claims that we HAD to in order to get Russia to fight Hitler. That's complete crap.

Further, it's just insane to say that Pat Buchanan is a Nazi apologist. He is no fan of Israel, and I'm not a big fan of his, but calling him anti-Semitic for that column is way over the top.

[PrinceC]

One guy on a blog goes after a nut who's articles are syndicated all over the country and this is supposed to show how "neo-cons take care of wing-nuts?"

o.k.

[baldilocks]

PC: yes. That's the very definition of an example.

[Aaron's cc:]

Jamie, ever hear Pat come to the defense of anyone who wasn't accused of being a nazi? Ever?

William F. Buckley devoted an issue of the National Review and found he could not defend Buchanan from the accusations of antisemitism.

When one disproportionately obsesses about one issue to the exclusion of others, it is quantifiable evidence of prejudice.

I'll also point readers to Victor Davis Hanson's article When Should We Stop Supporting Israel published in the National Review.

[David Blue]

baldilocks: "Is the wording precise enough now, DarkStar?"

Even though that was addressed to DarkStar, I'll butt in and say: the wording is precise enough for me.

It makes all the difference. "Now This How the Right Treat its Wingnuts" might be wrong. ("Might be." I don't follow American politics and history enough to make a judgement.) But "This How Neocons Treat Their Wingnuts" is correct, because here is a perfect example.

It makes sense. Neo-cons, new conservatives who haven't always been conservative and maybe still aren't on a lot of issues, but who have switched to some extent over issues of security, war, terrorism, and - bluntly - patriotism, aren't all going to look at Pat Buchanan's strange and unattractive statements and say, "he gets a free pass as a fellow-conservative."