TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122391/1223106.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.5 KB | 76 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 35

Loose Buchanan


    Pat Buchanan's announcement that he was running for President
was exactly in character. He was at pains to say how much he
likes George Bush. He was communications director in the
Reagan-Bush Administration and has dined with the current First
Family in their private White House quarters. But Buchanan has
his reasons for launching a full-frontal assault against the
fellow Republican he likes so much. For Buchanan, Bush is
insufficiently Buchanan-like -- not nativist, rightist,
homophobic, authoritarian or anti-Israel enough.

    Like many ultraconservatives, Buchanan is unfailingly kind
and generous to people regardless of their background. But he
can be just as cruel to the groups to which they belong. To
him, gays are "sodomites," the poor are "freeloaders," and
immigrants from anywhere but Western Europe are a threat to the
American way of life. Buchanan's remarks about Jews in
particular are so provocative that his fellow panelists on TV
political talk shows -- including Al Hunt of the Wall Street
Journal, Morton Kondracke of the New Republic and Washington
Post columnist Mark Shields -- have felt the need to say
publicly that their colleague is not an anti-Semite.

    That issue came up during the debate over whether the U.S.
should use force to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Buchanan
charged that there were "only two groups that are beating the
drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense ministry
and its amen corner in the U.S." New York Times columnist A.M.
Rosenthal accused Buchanan of anti-Semitism and "blood libel"
(a reference to the canard leveled by bigots since the Middle
Ages that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood in
making Passover matzo). Rosenthal's attack was so outrageous
that Buchanan survived the storm.

    Now the man Buchanan reveres as his "spiritual guide" has
taken Buchanan to the woodshed. In a 38,000-word essay in the
National Review, William F. Buckley Jr., the godfather of
conservatism, writes, "I find it impossible to defend Pat
Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the
period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it
was that drove him to say and do it; most probably an
iconoclastic temperament."

    That iconoclastic temperament has also driven Buchanan to
give sympathetic attention to crackpot Holocaust revisionists.
In addition, he made intemperate comments during his crusade to
prove the innocence of John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland
autoworker convicted by an Israeli court of having helped murder
hundreds of thousands of Jews as a Nazi death-camp guard known
as Ivan the Terrible. There is considerable evidence that
Buchanan may be right that Demjanjuk could not have been the
mass murderer of Treblinka. But Buchanan has also claimed that
diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill
anybody, much less 850,000 people at Treblinka; that the U.S.
should not have apologized to France for protecting Nazi war
criminal Klaus Barbie; and that Arthur Rudolph, the ex-Nazi
rocket scientist forced to leave the U.S. after the Justice
Department accused him of brutalizing slave laborers at a Nazi
rocket factory, was "railroaded."

    Those views go beyond being merely pugnacious. Four years
ago, Buchanan came close to running for the presidency with the
slogan LET THE BLOODBATH BEGIN. It is still his motto.

    By Margaret Carlson/Washington.