By Patrick J. Buchanan – February 26, 2002

What does conservatism stand for in 2002? What is it we wish to conserve? “Work, family, faith, community, country.” Were these not what Ronald Reagan celebrated?

Yet consider what is happening to community, country and work in America because of the free-trade zealotry of the Clintonites and the Bushites, who profess to be conservatives.

Last week, there came to my office from the keeper of the stats of U.S. industrial decline, Charles McMillion of MGB Information Services, the final figures for the U.S. merchandise trade deficit for 2001.

Patrick J. Buchanan – February 22, 2002

It was the greatest mistake of the Reagan presidency. Yet, President Bush seems about to repeat it.

In 1982, Reagan was persuaded to place U.S. Marines between Israelis and Palestinian fighters holed up in Beirut. The Marines went ashore to ensure peaceful passage of the PLO out of Lebanon. It was a mission limited in scope and widely welcomed. After landing, the Marines kept the enemies apart as Arafat and his Palestinians embarked for Tunis. In three weeks, the Marines were back aboard ship, mission accomplished.

By Patrick J. Buchanan – February 19, 2002

With his “Axis of Evil” speech threatening Iraq, Iran and North Korea with war if they deploy “weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Bush burned his bridges. And when Gen. Colin Powell told Congress we have no war plans regarding Iran and North Korea, the signal was clear all the way to Baghdad. Mr. Bush intends war on Iraq.

And when he goes to war, America must achieve its stated goal, “regime change,” or cease to be the invincible superpower.

Patrick J. Buchanan – February 15, 2002

Ideas have consequences, wrote conservative Richard Weaver. So do words, when uttered by the most powerful man on earth.

By threatening war against Iran, Iraq and North Korea in his now-famous “Axis of Evil” address, the president painted himself into a corner. Either Bush now goes to war against one of these regimes, or he will be humiliated and exposed as a bellicose bluff.

Let me say it again: Whoever fed Bush those lines, or did not argue against his delivering them, disserved the president. For that speech has blown our coalition against terror to smithereens.

Patrick J. Buchanan – February 12, 2002

The 1950s gave us the “Fifth Amendment Communists” – men who hid behind the Constitution to cover up their treason. Now, we have the Fifth Amendment capitalists, the Enron men who invoke the constitution to cover up their betrayal of faithful employees.

“Women and children first!” and “The captain goes down with his ship!” That was the manly code of honor we were taught as children. But, at Enron, the women and children were locked in steerage, so they would not interfere as captain and crew hauled the ship’s safe, with all the passengers’ valuables, into the lifeboats and shoved off. These fellows give new meaning to the old Marxist phrase “capitalist pigs.”

By Patrick J. Buchanan – February 8, 2002

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia certainly set the cat down among the pigeons the other day at his alma mater Georgetown University. Challenging the views of the pope and the U.S. bishops, the justice urged any Catholic judge who could not in conscience impose a death sentence to get off the bench.

“[T]he choice for the judge who believes the death penalty to be immoral,” said Scalia, “is resignation, rather than simply ignoring duly enacted constitutional laws and sabotaging the death penalty.”

By Patrick J. Buchanan – February 5, 2002

With the exception of the War Party pundits who are orgasmic over Mr. Bush’s threat to launch preventive wars against the “axis of evil,” Iran, Iraq and North Korea, volunteers for the Great Crusade seem notably absent. Nowhere, not even among the nations supposedly threatened, has there been a rallying to the colors.

The tepid, even negative, reaction to his war talk should tell Bush something: If America launches wars against Iraq, Iran and North Korea, she risks doing so alone, without allies.

Patrick J. Buchanan – February 1, 2002

“Upon what meat has this our Caesar fed that he has grown so great?”

The line from “Julius Caesar” came to mind as I watched the president, triumphant in the Afghan war, thunderously threaten three nations with war, should they seek to acquire weapons the United States has had in its arsenal for more than half a century.