by Patrick J. Buchanan

After losing both houses of Congress in the 1994 election, Bill Clinton expostulated: The president of the United States is not irrelevant!

On learning his trusted aide from Texas Scott McClellan has denounced as an “unnecessary war” the same Iraq war McClellan defended from the White House podium, George Bush must feel as Clinton did.

The synchronized savagery of the attacks on McClellan as turncoat suggests he drew blood. For what he has done is offer confirmation to the president’s war critics, from within the White House inner circle, that Bush’s motive in going to war was not a clear and present danger of attack by Iraq with weapons of mass destruction, but to advance a Bush crusade to impose democracy on the Middle East.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Europe, the Mother Continent of Western Man, is today aging and dying, unable to sustain the birth rates needed to keep her alive, or to resist conquest by an immigrant invasion from the Third World.

What happened to the nations that only a century ago ruled the world?

In “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” published today, this writer will argue that it was colossal blunders of British statesmen, Winston Churchill foremost among them, that turned two European wars into world wars that may yet prove the mortal wounds of the West.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“A Victory for Equality and Justice,” blared the headline above the editorial. “Momentous,” “historic,” “a major victory for civil rights,” “a scrupulously fair ruling based on law, precedents and common sense.”

This was the ecstatic reaction of The New York Times to the California Supreme Court’s declaration that homosexuals have a right to marry and have their unions recognized as marriages.

Now there may be hugging around the newsroom at the Times, where one senior writer said, a few years back, three-fourths of the folks who make up the front page are gay. But this is just another streetlight on America’s darkening path to perdition as a society and republic.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” wrote Alexander Pope.

Daily, our 43rd president testifies to Pope’s point.

Addressing the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s birth, Bush said those who say we should negotiate with Iran or Hamas are like the fools who said we should negotiate with Adolf Hitler.

“As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement. …”

by Patrick J. Buchanan

As Israel enters its 61st year, Israelis may look back with pride. Yet, the realists among them must also look forward with foreboding.

Israel is a modern democracy with the highest standard of living in the Middle East. In the high-tech industries of the future, she is in the first rank. From a nation of fewer than a million in 1948, Israel’s population has grown to 7 million. In seven wars — the 1948 War of Independence, the Sinai invasion of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the Lebanon wars of 1982 and 2006 — Israel has prevailed, though some of these wars were, as Wellington said of Waterloo, “a damn near-run thing.”

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

So said Bill Clinton in New Hampshire of Obama’s claim to have been a constant opponent of the war. Clinton cited Obama’s voting record, which was the same as Hillary’s in his early Senate years.

Yet, for this, the ex-president, designated by Toni Morrison as “our first black president,” was charged with playing the race card.

Clinton spent days explaining the “fairy tale” remark.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on” than Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton has told USA TODAY.

She cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Hillary. “These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that.”

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Is war with Iran inevitable, even imminent? Or is peace at hand?

From the public diplomacy of the administration, either conclusion may be reached. Consider.

“West Offers Iran ‘Refreshed’ Deal,” ran the headline in the May 3 Washington Times. The story described an offer to Iran, agreed to by all five members of the Security Council — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — of a sweetened grand bargain, if Tehran will suspend its enrichment of uranium.

Blessing the offering in London was Condi Rice.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of “The Hollow Men.”

Eliot’s poem was written after the Great War of 1914-1918 had carried off 9 million soldiers, wounded twice as many more, brought down the Romanov, Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires, and ushered onto the world stage Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and, soon, Adolf Hitler.

Readers have ascribed various meanings to Eliot’s words. One college professor of English suggested Eliot was looking back to the “whimper” in the cradle in Bethlehem that signaled the end of the old world, the Pax Romana, and the coming of the new Christian age.