by Patrick J. Buchanan

For Dr. James Watson, 79-year-old co-winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine for his discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, October marked the nadir of a brilliant career.

The month began with Watson headed to London to promote his new book, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science,” and to lecture to a sold-out audience at the prestigious Science Museum. An author’s dream tour.

Last week, his lecture was canceled, his tour terminated, his 40-year tenure as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island came to an end. Across Britain, he was being denounced as a racist.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“I was conservative yesterday, I’m a conservative today, and I will be a conservative tomorrow,” declared Fred Thompson to the Conservative Party of New York, billing himself as the “consistent conservative” in the GOP race – in contrast to ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani.

In his defense, Rudy cites George Will as calling his eight years in office in the Big Apple the most conservative city government in 50 years.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

The scaremongers are not always wrong. The Trojans should have listened to Cassandra. But history shows that the scaremongers are usually wrong.

Parson Malthus predicted mass starvation 250 years ago, as the population was growing geometrically, doubling each generation, while agricultural production was going arithmetically, by 2 percent or so a year. But today, with perhaps 1 percent of our population in full-time food production, we are the best-fed and fattest 300 million people on Earth.

Karl Marx was proven dead wrong about the immiseration of the masses under capitalism and the coming revolution in the industrial West, though they still have hopes at Harvard.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“Putin’s Hostile Course,” the lead editorial in the Washington Times of Oct. 18, began thus:

“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Moscow is just the latest sign that, more than 16 years after the collapse of Soviet communism, Moscow is gravitating toward Cold War behavior. The old Soviet obsession – fighting American imperialism – remains undiluted. …

“(A)t virtually every turn, Mr. Putin and the Russian leadership appear to be doing their best in ways large and small to marginalize and embarrass the United States and undercut U.S. foreign policy interests.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Observing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic House imperil a U.S.-Turkish alliance of 60 years – by formally charging Turkey with genocide in a 1915 massacre of the Armenians – the question comes to mind:

Does this generation have the maturity to lead America?

About the horrors visited on Armenians in 1915, that year of Turkish triumph over the Royal Navy in the Dardanelles, which led to the ouster of First Lord Winston Churchill and of victory over the British-French-ANZAC invasion force on Gallipoli, there is no doubt.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Have the Bush Republicans ceased to be reliable custodians of American sovereignty? So it would seem.

President George W. Bush began well. He rejected the Kyoto Protocol on global warming negotiated by Vice President Al Gore as both injurious to the economy and rooted in questionable science. He refused to allow the armed forces and diplomats of the United States to be brought under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

What is it that distinguishes Bush Republicanism from the Coolidge, Taft, Eisenhower and Reagan varieties? Four major issues come to mind.

Bush is a “Big Government conservative” who repudiated the “government-is-the-problem” philosophy of Reagan. His No Child Left Behind program, doubling the size of the Department of Education, and his vast expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs so testify.

Second, Bush believes in Wilsonian interventionism, including the use of military force, to advance a “global democratic revolution” and “end tyranny on earth.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan

With President Bush reaching new lows in national polls, Christian conservatives threatening to bolt if Rudy is the nominee and the Iraq war bleeding support in Middle America, Republicans are in a funk about 2008.

And understandably and deservedly so.

The war, a product of hubris, born of the smashing triumph in Afghanistan, and ideology, a Wilsonian vision of democratizing the Middle East, has been a disaster for the country and the party that plunged us into it. And the Bush amnesty for illegal aliens ignited a rebellion that dealt the establishment its worst thrashing in many moons.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Many in Congress deeply regret having voted President Bush a blank check for war in October 2002. And they are frustrated at their inability to compel him to begin bringing the troops home.

Why, then, is Congress pushing for a new confrontation, with Iran, which could involve us in a war with a nation four times the size of Iraq?

In July, the Senate voted 97 to zero to censure Iran for complicity in the killing of U.S. soldiers by enhanced IEDs that Iran’s Quds Force is said to be providing Iraqi insurgents. Last week, the Senate voted 76 to 22 to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist organization.”