On Pat Buchanan, please somebody tell me why this man is paraded

[candy331]

on TV as if he has a wits end as to issues. I think about the only thing he makes sense on is the Iraq war. I listened to him on the Mc Lauglin(sp) report this morning rewriting history on FDR and Yalta, the man says that FDR was a fool to trust Stalin that the US should have marched right up against the Soviets that FDR did not need the Soviets help.. Now mind you I might not have this in exact wording but substance and I say Buchanan is an old nut whose usefulness is about eaten up. Did any here see him on M report?

[Dudley_DUright]

1. Yup

He was brought up on his daddy's knee to hate FDR. Some people never overcome their early programming.

[LuPeRcALiO]

2. Pat has the courage of his confusion

sorry I missed it

[NewJeffCT]

3. yes, attacking the Russians would have been brilliant

Especially since our forces were still fighting Japan and that the Russians at the time had like twice the number of men on the ground in Germany & Eastern Europe as the US & their allies did at the time. Sure, maybe our forces were a bit better... but, when Germany invaded Russia a few years earlier, their forces were far superior to the Russians and look what happened there.

[ashmanonar]

4. it would have broken the first rule of warfare

don't start a landwar in asia!

[expatriot]

9. we could have done it. i am not saying we should have, we shouldnt

have.... but the Soviet nation was like a bloodied prize fighter after 20 rounds in the ring. All of its European cities were destroyed, its manpower was exhuasted. It was over-mobilized.

If we had waited until September, after our defeat of Japan, then we could have done it. Our Pacific forces could have taken the Soviet far east very easily. The only thing that saved the Soviets against the Germans in the first place was US and British aid... military and otherwise... and German strategic paralysis... Hitler kept changing his minds about the objectives in the summer, fall and winter of 1941.... this drove his generals crazy. he'd switch from thinking that Moscow was the objective to thinking that he wanted to take the "Holy cities of COmmunism" - Leningrad and Stalingrad around the same time as he took Moscow. Another thing, the Germans would have rallied to our side in an instant, which would have given us invaluable knowledge and experience in fighting the Ruskies for 4 years.

[expatriot]

15. I have heard that Stalin believed the Soviet Union was doomed in

the summer through winter of 1941... he is said to have even blamed himself for miscalculating how soon Hitler would invade Russia and for crippling the officer corps with the purges. My best friend got a degree in East Europoean History (well, I guess officially its a History degree with an East European History emphasis)... and he took a whole class in psychological studies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky and he said that Stalin did not speak to anyone from the Russian invasion of June until that winter when the Germans were stalled outside of Moscow... I mean he, Stalin, was close to being absent in the running of the USSR at this time. It was all done by his inner circle but they managed to fool the Russian people that Stalin was still at the reigns of course for propaganda purpose. BUt then in the winter, with German sprawled out in the RUssian winter, Stalin got a hold of himself and returned in full tyranical glory.

[KharmaTrain]

5. Pitchfork Pat Is A Media Superstar

So much of what we see is a Beltway circle jerk...especially these weekend "talk shows".

Remember, most of these programs are "filler"...things to throw in on the weekend that is pre-recording during the week and pre-planned and booked. These networks hate things that upset that apple cart, like a story that breaks late on a Friday.

Nothing fills the hours of air time on these networks better than talking heads...especially the ones you pay for. Buchanan has been under contract with MSGOP and they don't hesitate to use him. He's trotted out on a daily basis. You see the same people on these shows...always bleating the same talking points. There's no real discussion going on here...just a recap of what the left and right think each other is thinking...which is almost always wrong.

To his credit, McLaughlin is turning into a very vocal critic of this regime. He's been very much against the Iraq invasion and sees it for the profiteering venture and humanitarian disaster many of us do. He's also become a critic of the fiscal recklessness and the soaring debts. He sees the social issue games like Schaivo and the judicial judge showdown as being distractions from serious issues. And this coming from a man who truly detested Clinton...and now it appears he's developed a similiar loathing for the Chimpmesiter. It's fun to watch McLaughlin punch Buchanan and Blankley around...one of the few who will take the talking points and ram it up their behinds.

[Cleita]

10. I guess you can kiss McLaughlin goodby when his contract is up.

No need for some senile old guy who can't remember what the script says. :sarcasm:

[specimenfred1984]

6. I've Thought That For the Last 20 Years

everytime I ever had the misfortune to tune into any of those shows, like Meet (and lie to) the Press, CNN, Faux, etc...

Their actual usefullness is to reinforce the denial of the public, therefore not causing extreme cognitive dissonance to the brainwashed and deluded.

[Cleita]

7. He wrote a book rewriting history on the Nazi/WWII era.

He said Hitler wasn't that bad, and the holocaust was overblown and six million people killed couldn't be proven.It reminds me of the few bad apples argument of the Bush administration about the Abu Ghraib prison abuse.

[readmylips]

8. Wasn't he Reverend Pat Buchanan?....

I could have sworn he used to be a pritcher, reverend, whatever, oil snake salesman. Still is big time.

[Cleita]

12. You're thinking of Pat Robertson.n/t

[MnFats]

11. he is a hateful old fossil. the networks believe that to be 'fair'...

...they must include a voice representing the hateful old fossils.
that's basically about it.even Wm. F. Buckley said he could not defend Buchanan against charges of anti-semitism. in his autobiography, he brags about getting into a fistfight with two cops. One wonders what he'd have to say about someone from the Clinton administration getting into a fistfight with two cops, the flaming hypocrite.

[Botany]

13. The man is still dealing w/ his own demons.

With his father's encouragement he and his brothers used to
beat up Jewish kids on the way home from school. 25 years
after Nelson Rockefeller's death he still complains about him.

take whatever he says worth a grain of salt.

[punpirate]

14. This is a meme that the right has clung to...

... for a long, long time. At the time of Yalta, the US was contemplating an invasion of Japan, and they would have needed Soviet help to do that.

And, there is the longstanding hatred of the right for FDR and all things FDR-like.

But, it was dominant theme among the right from near the war's end through the early `50s that the US needed to attack the Soviet Union unilaterally and preemptively--before they could develop atomic weapons--because the US had military dominance at the time, and should use that dominance to establish itself as the sole superpower emerging from the world war. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

If you search around for "NSC-68," you'll find that the issue was prominent then and figured into national security planning. Probably the only reason why a preemptive nuclear attack did not happen was the assessment that the US couldn't win the war on the ground (something that, if looking at the US nuclear inventory at the time, was a chimera--the US probably could have killed 75-80% of the Soviet Union's population with a massive first strike).

Buchanan, and many others on the right, have sought to blame FDR--and Truman--for not taking advantage of the military imbalance at the time, and are not thinking a bit about the long-term damage such an attack would have created. Buchanan, and others, let ideology overcome common sense. That's why they attack the common sense deliberations that occurred at Yalta.

Cheers.