by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 29, 2003

Though Iraq does not threaten us, has not attacked us, cannot defeat us, and does not want war with us, the United States is about to invade and occupy that country. If we do, it will be the first purely imperial war in our history, a war launched to reshape the domestic politics and foreign policy of another nation to conform to our own.

A war to convert Iraq into a vassal state in the Middle East is something the War Party has sought for a decade. Sept. 11 gave it the opening to foist its agenda on an outraged and untutored president.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 27, 2003

Among those predicting the crash of the bubble market of the 1990s, this writer was among the first. Putting my money behind that prediction, I pulled my pension funds out of the market and placed them into bonds with a fixed rate of return.

Unfortunately, my pullout came in 1997, so we missed the last two and most bullish years of the great bull market.

However, as U.S. equity markets have tanked for three straight years – a pullback unseen since the Depression – and are now below where I ejected, my prediction is looking prescient.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 25, 2003

Declaring the imposition of the death penalty to be “arbitrary, capricious … and immoral,” Illinois’ exiting, scandal-plagued Gov. George Ryan commuted the death sentence of every rapist-murderer and child-killer in the state.

This decision “commands respect,” cooed the Washington Post. Gov. Ryan “leaves Illinois a better place.” From the rejoicing in the penitentiaries of Illinois, 167 murderers agree.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 22, 2003

Is the War Party setting up President Bush for a charge of having carried off an Asian Munich? So it would appear.

In a bylined piece by John McCain in The Weekly Standard (”Don’t Appease Pyongyang”), Bush is warned: Do not return to the status quo with North Korea that existed from the Clinton-Carter Agreed Framework of 1994 – prior to last fall’s discovery that Kim Jong Il has been operating a secret uranium-enrichment program.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 20, 2003

Unfortunately, President Bush’s powerful words condemning the race-based admissions tests at the University of Michigan did not extend to the entire idea of “affirmative action.” For that phrase has to come to mean quotas and racial preferences that are every bit as odious as the policies they were designed to correct.

Affirmative action belongs in the same graveyard as Jim Crow. But now we must rely upon the U.S. Supreme Court to put it there.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 13, 2003

“Mr. Bush the Wedge Driver,” railed the Washington Post, as it bemoaned what it calls the president’s “first attack in an ill-timed and partisan war.”

What exactly did Bush do to provoke the war? He kept his word to an electorate that gave him a thumping victory in November by renominating to the 5th Circuit, U.S. District Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. of Mississippi. Last year, Pickering had been smeared and rejected by an obstructionist Senate Judiciary Committee on a straight party-line vote.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 7, 2003

“The United States of America,” President Bush thundered to a wildly cheering Congress, “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

The challenge Bush threw down a year ago has now been taken up. The Stalinist regime of North Korea, arguably the “world’s most dangerous,” has just admitted it is building the world’s most destructive weapons. And Bush’s response? “Let’s talk.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 6, 2003

Almost all who visit Gettysburg, best preserved of all the Civil War battlefields, find it a deeply moving experience. This is truly hallowed ground. Here, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers fought the decisive battle of America’s bloodiest war.

From the first clash of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia, to Lee’s attempt to turn the Union flank at Little Round Top on the second day, to Pickett’s Charge against the Union center on Seminary Ridge on the third, to Lee’s bleeding retreat back over the Potomac as a frustrated Abraham Lincoln wondered why his newest commander, George Meade, had not finished Lee’s army with its back to the swollen river – it is an incredible story, told wonderfully well by the guides at Gettysburg Battlefield.

by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 1, 2003

If Republicans thought that tossing Trent Lott off the sleigh would slow the pursuing wolves, they were mistaken. The moral shakedown of the GOP, for Lott’s sin in telling 100-year-old Strom Thurmond he would have made a great president, has only just begun.

On Dec. 27, Al Sharpton got the meeting he had demanded of Lott’s successor, Sen. Bill Frist. From the report by James Lakely in the Washington Times, Al laid down terms of surrender.