The Wall Street Journal accuses Pat Buchanan of being anti-growth.
I am proud to say I have been a viewer, reader, and supporter of Pat Buchanan for decades. I have watched all the different shows that he has either participated in or founded. His career as a commentator has stretched from the 1970’s with his radio program the Buchanan – Barden Program and his commentaries for NBC. His work in television has helped shape a whole industry of imitators. He founded Crossfire on CNN and was a founding member of the McLaughlin Group. He was also a founding member of the Capital Gang on PBS.
As a journalist he started at 23 as the youngest editorial writer on a major newspaper in America: The St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He then became the first full-time staffer on Richard Nixon’s legendary comeback campaign in 1966. He traveled with the future President in the campaigns of 1966 and 1968, served as special assistant through the final days of Watergate, and stayed on in the Ford White House until 1974. He returned to the White House in the 1980’s as Communications Director for Ronald Reagan.
In his White House years, Mr. Buchanan wrote foreign policy speeches, and attended four summits, including Mr. Nixon’s historic opening to China in 1972, and Ronald Reagan’s Reykjavik summit in1986 with Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 1992 Pat made a heroic run for the presidency against President George H. W. Bush, seriously challenging Bush, and winning 38 percent of the votes in the New Hampshire primary garnering more than three million total votes in the primaries. His speech, the Culture War speech, at the Republican Convention still stirs the hearts of Americans.
In 1996 he ran for the presidency again. His opponents were Senator Bob Dole, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, and publisher Steve Forbes. Pat defeated Senator Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary, he won three other states (Alaska, Missouri, and Louisiana), and finished only slightly behind Dole in the Iowa caucus. He eventually bowed out of the race when it became apparent that Dole, the establishment candidate was going to win the nomination.
In 2000 Pat ran for President as the candidate of the Reform Party, which had been founded by Ross Perot in the 1990’s. He lost this bid receiving 449,895 votes, 0.4% of the popular vote.
Pat has written ten books, including six straight New York Times best sellers A Republic, Not an Empire; The Death of the West; Where the Right Went Wrong; State of Emergency; Day of Reckoning and Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War. All of which I have read and highly recommend. His newest book is The Greatest Comeback.
He is the founder of The American Conservative the flagship magazine for paleoconservative thought and his editorials are found all over the web.
In other words Pat Buchanan, in my estimation, is a national treasure and the Godfather of the Paleoconservative. As I said, I am proud to identify as a follower of Pat Buchanan, his politics, and his thoughts.
In its effort to mobilize support for the latest round of Free Trade giveaways that bastion of Neocon Globalization, the Wall Street Journal has tried to use Pat Buchanan as a whipping boy. They have tried to lay the blame for their own pet policies at the door of the one man who more than anyone else has tried to warn us about the very consequences that are dragging us from the first world to the third.
In an editorial dated May 10th 2015 the Journal said:
Here we go again. In the 1990s Pat Buchanan launched a civil war within the Republican Party on a platform targeting immigration and trade. Some claimed Pitchfork Pat was the future of the GOP, though in the end he mainly contributed to its presidential defeats.
In the waning days of the Obama Presidency the GOP’s Buchanan wing is making a comeback, and in ways that are revealing about its ultimate agenda. The leader of this movement in Congress is Jeff Sessions, who has long railed against illegal immigration but since becoming chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on immigration has taken a more public stance against legal immigration.
Now he’s opposing the bipartisan effort to pass trade promotion authority and in the process showing that his objections aren’t only about the law or immigrants. They’re rooted in the same hostility to markets and globalization that animates the slow-growth Democratic left.
This is like the man who convinced you to sell your house for a bag of magic beans blaming the man who told you a house is worth more than beans for you ending up with a bag of beans.
Pat warned us about NAFTA, GATT and MFN for China. He told us these things would lead to the gutting of American manufacturing. The Wall Street Journal and the Amen Choir over at the Chamber of Commerce cheered them on. What has been the result? Between 2000 and 2010, 55,000 U.S. factories closed and 5 million to 6 million manufacturing jobs disappeared along with the middle class lives they used to provide.
Since these Free Trade boondoggles have been shoved down our throats we have consistently run multibillion dollar trade deficits with China. Last year’s deficit was $325 billion, or twice China’s defense budget. It is all this money draining from our economy to China’s that allows them to build a world-class military that is poised to challenge America for supremacy in Asia.
The Journal accuses Pat of being anti-growth. However as Pat points out, “as trade surpluses add to a nation’s GDP, trade deficits subtract from it. Does the Journal think our $11 trillion in trade deficits since 1992 represents a pro-growth policy?”
Back in 1992 when there were 3 or 4 million illegals in America. Pat campaigned to secure the borders. That didn’t happen and now there are 11, 12, who knows how many million illegals and more pouring in every day. Is this good for America or is it bad? The Journal and the open borders crowd call Pat a xenophobe. I call him a patriot.
Pat has also called for a moratorium on immigration as we had from 1924-1965 so that those who are here can be assimilated and become Americanized. I believe that one reason America is great, one reason why we have developed the most vibrant and lively society in the History of the world is because we have subsumed the best people from everywhere. All of us except the Native Americans are immigrants. We have come from every country on the globe. And together we have morphed into one people. We used to brag about the great melting pot of American society. This is what Pat is urging we once again use to incubate our newer arrivals as they become us. Instead the Journal and the other hyphenated American cheerleaders urge us to become a smelting pot leading to what Teddy Roosevelt called, a “polyglot boarding-house”
Now that 100% of the job growth since 2000 has gone to immigrants. Now that illegals feel secure enough to emerge from the shadows and hold public demonstrations outside the White House as well as in the middle of major cities. Now that schools are forced to teach in dozens sometimes hundreds of different languages. Now that more than 60.6 million or 20.8 or 1/5 of American households do not speak English in their homes. Now that this is the reality we all face who was right about the open borders? Pat who wanted us to take a break and assimilate our new arrivals or those who wanted the cheap labor and the support of undocumented voters?
What about our rapidly deteriorating foreign policy? Pat supported the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan but counseled a quick withdrawal once its objectives had been met. He opposed the invasion of Iraq pointing out that this country had not attacked us and did not pose a threat to our vital interests. The Neocon leadership still has us nation building in Afghanistan, and Iraq has become the quagmire Pat predicted.
If we had been following Pat’s advice on trade, immigration, and foreign policy we would be safer, richer, and more secure.
If the Neocons are going to use Pat Buchanan as a whipping boy they should know there are those who see him for what he really is: a visionary, a leader, a patriot, and a great American. So when it comes to the current debate over who lost America I’m standing where I have for decades. I’m standing with Pat.
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