{"id":5012,"date":"2012-02-23T09:14:15","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T14:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/?p=5012"},"modified":"2012-02-24T01:57:28","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T06:57:28","slug":"missing-pat-buchanan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/missing-pat-buchanan-5012","title":{"rendered":"Missing Pat Buchanan"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Stanley Fish – The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I miss him already,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the MSNBC<\/strong> commentator Chris Matthews said Friday. The \u00e2\u20ac\u0153him\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Matthews is already missing is Patrick J. Buchanan, and in this year of a national campaign I miss him too, and have been missing him since early fall, when he disappeared from MSNBC<\/strong> because of protests following the publication of his book \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Suicide of a Superpower.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

In that book Buchanan admits nostalgia for the America he knew as a young man and the privileged position of the white race, then taken for granted. He asserts that there has been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a long and successful campaign to expel Christianity from the public square\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153reduce its role to that of just another religion.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He declares that nothing in the Constitution \u00e2\u20ac\u0153mandated social, racial or gender equality.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He asks, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What motivates people who insist that America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s doors be held open wide open until the European majority has disappeared?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He refuses to apologize for seeking to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153preserve the country we grew up in.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He maintains that when \u00e2\u20ac\u0153black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d we still \u00e2\u20ac\u0153shared a country and a culture\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153were one nation.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

It was in response to sentiments like those that MSNBC<\/strong> President Phil Griffin declared himself uncomfortable with having Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s views in the mix of his network\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s opinions. But Griffin is a little late to that party, given that Buchanan had been saying the same things for at least 40 years, from the time he appeared in defense of his boss Richard Nixon at the Watergate hearings to the electrifying and controversial speech he gave at the 1992 Republican convention to the fiery exchanges with Michael Kinsley<\/strong> on the TV<\/strong> program \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Crossfire\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to the extended debate he had with the MSNBC<\/strong> host Rachel Maddow about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, a nomination he saw as inspired by affirmative action.<\/p>\n

Many of those who have protested MSNBC<\/strong>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision to part company with Buchanan cite the point-counterpoint type debates with Kinsley, Maddow, Matthews and others as evidence that the conservative Buchanan contributed a salutary balance to programming that was predominantly left-leaning. He offered another perspective, they say, and they wonder about what they see as intolerance displayed by a network that typically champions liberal virtues.<\/p>\n

My own disappointment at Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s departure goes in another direction \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in fact in two. First, Buchanan is an extraordinarily acute observer of the political scene. His knowledge of past campaigns \u00e2\u20ac\u201d including knowledge of what went on behind the scenes \u00e2\u20ac\u201d is encyclopedic. No one is more skilled at contextualizing a present moment in our political drama so that viewers can understand the history informing a decision or action that appears on its surface to be inexplicable, even zany. When Buchanan offers that kind of analysis, his pugnacious junkyard-dog persona falls away and is replaced by a precision that is almost professorial. It is a pleasure to watch, just as it is a pleasure to watch some coaches-turned-analyst who can explain what is going on in an athletic contest because they have been there.<\/p>\n

Buchanan has also been there. That is the second thing I will miss: the contributions of someone who is not only reporting on history in the making, but has been part of that history himself….<\/p>\n

Read more at The New York Times…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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by Stanley Fish – The New York Times \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I miss him already,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews said Friday. The \u00e2\u20ac\u0153him\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Matthews is already missing is Patrick J. Buchanan, and in this year of a national campaign I miss him too, and have been missing him since early fall, when … <\/p>\n

Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n

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