by Patrick J. Buchanan – December 22, 1997

Those who warned that the U.S. troop commitment to Bosnia risked an open-ended entanglement in the Balkans were right. Bill Clinton has now confirmed that U.S. troops will remain indefinitely. No plan, no strategy, no timetable exists for their withdrawal.

What are the conditions the president has set before the United States can leave? Bosnia’s joint institutions must be “self-sustaining.” A civilian police force must be in place, large enough and sufficiently trained to keep order in the country. And Bosnia’s media should be “free of hate and venom.” This is a formula for permanent entrapment.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – December 18, 1997

The blockheads at the IMF and World Bank were
sitting in the cab of the locomotive when it jumped
the tracks and went over the trestle into the creek.
Now, they want to oversee rail safety!…

The American diplomatic collapse at Kyoto, Japan, has one salutary benefit. It vindicates totally the coalition that denied Bill Clinton “fast-track” authority. The Kyoto cave-in is conclusive proof that Clinton and Al Gore cannot be trusted to defend U.S. vital interests. Congress remains America’s last line of defense.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – December 15, 1997

“First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen” was the tribute of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee on the death of his old chief, the greatest American of his age, George Washington.

Two centuries later, the father of his country has become an embarrassment to some of his countrymen and his name an epithet. In New Orleans, the name George Washington has been stripped from an elementary school under a school board policy that prohibits the honoring of “former slave owners or others who did not respect equal opportunity for all.” Twenty-two schools have undergone name changes to erase the memory of slaveholding governors, segregationists and Confederate icons like Robert E. Lee.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – December 11, 1997

On Sept. 2, 1945, Gen. Douglas MacArthur stood on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay as the Empire of Japan, in the person of Foreign Minister Shigemitsu, signed its surrender.

On Dec. 7, 1997, Al Gore rose in Kyoto to tell the world America was ending its resistance and would submit to a draconian regime on global warming. Undersecretary of State Stuart E. Eizenstat, playing the role of Shigemitsu, signed the instruments of surrender. Under the Kyoto Protocol, Americans must cut fossil fuel consumption by 2012 — to 7 percent below what we were consuming seven years ago.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – December 8, 1997

With each bailout, money managers go unpunished
and, indeed, are rewarded for stupidity, while
incompetent regimes never pay the price of their
economic blunders and thus never correct
them…And if the stock price of Reed’s bank
plunged, and loans had to be written down, and
other big bankers were exposed as chowderheads,
is that not the price a free market imposes on those
who fail?…

by Patrick J. Buchanan – December 1, 1997

During the civil rights movement, demonstrators who “sat in” at segregated lunch counters or defied court orders were routinely absolved. And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was lionized by our liberal establishment for his imitation of India’s apostle of non-violence, Gandhi, and his understanding of the validity of civil disobedience.

The South was wrong, it was said; the civil rights movement was right. And many were the illegal actions pardoned and hallowed in the name of the “civil rights revolution.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan – December 1, 1997

If the people of South Korea were starving, Americans would send food. If they were victims of a natural disaster, an earthquake or typhoon, planeloads of American doctors and nurses, shiploads of medicine and supplies, would be instantly on the way.

But Asia’s financial crisis is not a natural disaster; it is man-made, the work of corrupt and incompetent political elites, crony capitalists and idiot-investors who deserted their own countries to chase hot profits in Asia. Obligations of charity do not apply here. What these avaricious bankrupts want Americans to do is to pick up the hotel and bar bills from their decade-long orgy. No thanks.