Author: Patrick J. Buchanan (Patrick J. Buchanan)

Home Patrick J. Buchanan
Post

Last Hurrah for Reagan Coalition?

The huge Democratic turnout in the Iowa Caucuses, over twice that of the GOP, and the stampede by independents to vote in the Democratic precincts, suggests that Iowa, a swing state carried by President Bush in 2004, may be lost irretrievably to the GOP in ...

Post

The Impotent Hegemon

“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” Emerson’s couplet comes to mind as the New Year opens with Pakistan, the second largest Muslim country on Earth, in social and political chaos, trending toward a failed state with nuclear weapons. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whom the White House pressed to return home from exile...

Post

Time Gets Serious Again

Good for Time. Its Person of the Year was Vladimir Putin, who has presided over the economic rebirth of his nation and reasserted Russia’s role as a great power. A first runner-up was Gen. David Petraeus, leader of the “surge” in Iraq that staved off what appeared a U.S. defeat and debacle, and helped revive...

Post

The Mitt-Mike Religious War

Four weeks before New Hampshire and three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican race has become a proxy religious war. On one side is a Baptist preacher who called homosexuality

Post

The Recantation of Dr. Watson

For Dr. James Watson, 79-year-old co-winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine for his discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, October marked the nadir of a brilliant career. The month began with Watson headed to London to promote his new book, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science,” and to lecture...

Post

Unfit for Command

Observing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic House imperil a U.S.-Turkish alliance of 60 years—by formally charging Turkey with genocide in a 1915 massacre of the Armenians—the question comes to mind: Does this generation have the maturity to lead America? About the horrors visited on Armenians in 1915, that year of Turkish triumph over the...

Post

Paging Senator Biden

Many in Congress deeply regret having voted President Bush a blank check for war in October 2002. And they are frustrated at their inability to compel him to begin bringing the troops home. Why, then, is Congress pushing for a new confrontation, with Iran, which could involve us in a war with a nation four...

Post

Buenas Noches, America

“Mexico does not end at its borders. . . . Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.” That astonishing claim, by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, in his state of the nation address at the National Palace Sunday, brought his audience wildly cheering to its feet. Were the United States a serious nation, Calderon’s claim...

Post

The Color of Crime

The execution-style murder of three African-American college students in Newark, N.J., forced to kneel and shot in the head—allegedly by an illegal alien from Peru who was out on bail for the serial rape of a 5-year-old—has the makings of a Willie Horton issue in 2008. Newark, like New York, is a “sanctuary city,” where...

Post

How Scooter Skated

Why did Bush do it? Why did he suddenly barge into the legal process and erase the entire 30-month sentence of Scooter Libby? For, from his own statement, Bush found the act deeply distasteful. In that statement, Bush calls Libby’s crimes “serious convictions of perjury and obstruction of justice.” He praises Patrick Fitzgerald as “a...

Post

In Defeat, a Bush Opportunity

In Defeat, a Bush Opportunity by Patrick J. Buchanan • July 3, 2007 • Printer-friendly “I’ll see you at the bill signing,” said a cocky George W. Bush in Bulgaria, when he heard the Senate had just fallen 15 votes short of voting cloture on the Kennedy-Kyl immigration bill he had embraced. Bush returned home,...

Post

The Retreat of the Old Bulls

What was anticipated in September, the retreat of the old bulls of the Republican Party from the Bush war policy, happened in June. The beginning of the end of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war is at hand.

Post

See Rudy and John Run

In July 1861, the Union Army marched out of the capital to meet the Confederates forming up at Manassas. Washingtonians packed picnic lunches and followed to enjoy the rebel rout. By nightfall, the Union Army was straggling back to the city. Stunned and panicked spectators had already returned to report the defeat of Gen. McDowell’s...

Post

Who Lost Russia?

By 1988, Ronald Reagan, who had famously branded the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” was striding through Red Square arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev. Russians were pounding both men on the back. They had just signed the greatest arms reduction agreement in history—eliminating all Soviet SS-20s targeted on Europe, in return for removal of the Pershing...

Post

Does “The Decider” Decide on War?

Has Congress given George Bush a green light to attack Iran? For he is surely behaving as though it is his call alone. And evidence is mounting that we are on a collision course for war. —Iran has detained several Iranian-Americans, seemingly in retaliation for our continuing to hold five Iranians in Iraq. —The U.N....

Post

The New World Order GOP

A federal program, Ronald Reagan used to say, is the closest thing to eternal life here on earth. Even the Gipper conceded he failed to get control of the federal behemoth. At least he tried. But what can be said for the conservative movement today, as one witnesses the Wall Street Journal battle to save...

A Republic Not an Empire
Post

A Republic Not an Empire

Foreign policy, the elites of both Beltway parties tell us, is not an issue in this election year. By that, they mean it is off the table, a matter already decided upon and settled by those who know what is best for America. So they, and their media auxiliaries, redirect our attention away from foreign...

Toward One Nation, Indivisible
Post

Toward One Nation, Indivisible

It is time we looked at the world from a new perspective, one of enlightened nationalism. Cliches about a “new” global economy aside, there has always been an international economy—ever since Columbus stumbled onto the Western Hemisphere while seeking new trade routes to the East, in the hire of a nation-state, Spain. The Dutch East...

Mr. Lincoln’s War An Irrepressible Conflict?
Post

Mr. Lincoln’s War An Irrepressible Conflict?

        “[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions … are the...