Soccer Dad

Casual antisemitism

I had see a link to Pat Buchanan's analysis of the Plame scandal. Sure enough, he agrees that there was deceit involved in the decision to go to war against Iraq. No surprise there.

But he doesn't feel that lying to get us into war is criminal. Here's the surprise:

(But if lying us into war is a crime, we would have to have a second look at that FDR memorial on the trail to Haynes Point.)

That was a surprise. The bigger surprise, of course, is that it doesn't inspire the same sort of outrage that Trent Lott's nostalgia for Jim Crow inspire.

Buchanan has, for a number of years, been of the opinion that from the standpoint of the allies, WW II should not have been fought.

He wrote a book to that effect, and about a half year ago he wrote a column "Was World War II Worth It?" in which he argues:

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.

If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe? If it was to keep Hitler out of Central and Eastern Europe, then, inevitably, Stalin would inherit Central and Eastern Europe.

His Holocaust denial would make him a persona non grata in many circles. (About the only other person who isn't immediately rejected in polite company for Holocaust denial, is Dr. Mahmoud Abbas, who earned his PhD in the subject.)

Don Feder, his one time friend, has once again effectively critiqued Buchanan's rant after calling him a "...gloomy, muttering, obsessive crank.":

Perhaps Pat has a magical calculator for figuring the sum of oppression, torture, and mass murder. I don’t know how he reached his conclusion, unless – as I suspect – he cares about the victims of the Red terror but is blasé about graves dug by the Swastika.

And as Jonathan Tobin points out, liberals are less likely to be offended by Buchanan's antisemitism than are conservatives. The question is why? Why has Buchanan not been determined to have crossed the line that Lott did?

Posted by SoccerDad at October 24, 2005 12:18 PM