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Jewish World Review Sept. 29, 1999 /19 Tishrei, 5760

Linda Chavez

Linda Chavez
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Econophone

I knew the real Pat Buchanan

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- NEWS FLASH: Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has been abducted by aliens. No, not the ones he's been trying to keep from coming across our southern borders. I'm talking little green men in spaceships. Body snatchers. The kind capable of morphing into an exact replica of a real human being -- usually someone good and/or powerful -- and then, performing dastardly deeds, like taking over the world.

Sound too weird to be true? Hear me out. I knew the real Pat Buchanan. I worked for him in Ronald Reagan's White House in 1985. We spent hours together every day, in meetings, or just talking over the day's events after work in his windowless cubbyhole of an office down the hall from the president's own. And this fellow who's been masquerading as Pat the past few years? Well, it just isn't the same man, I swear.

Take the recent controversy over U.S. involvement in World War II this strange impostor Buchanan has gotten himself embroiled in.

This putative Pat all but blames Britain and the Allies for starting World War II, because they declared war against the Nazis when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. "By redirecting Hitler's first blow upon themselves, Britain and France bought Stalin two extra years to prepare for Hitler's attack -- and thus, saved the Soviet Union for Communism," writes this Buchanan chimera in his new book, "A Republic, Not An Empire."

Now, the real Pat knows that the primary reason Hitler waited to invade the Soviet Union was a nasty little agreement, the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact signed in August 1939, one month before Germany invaded Poland. Indeed Uncle Joe and the Fuhrer were on such good terms at the time, they divvied up Poland nicely between them. It wasn't until the summer of 1941 that Hitler attacked Russia, after he had overrun not only Eastern Europe but Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and France, and exacted a punishing toll on Great Britain.

But it's not just this curious Pat's views on history that make me certain he's a fake. It's his newfound love of mother Russia. Why, he practically turned weepy on Fox News Sunday, describing the U.S. decision to back the expansion of NATO into the Soviet's former orbit of Eastern Europe. "How do you think they feel? They've lost the Cold War. We're rubbing their nose in their defeat." Let me tell you, Patrick J. Buchanan liked nothing better than rubbing his political adversaries' noses in defeat.

Practically every view I ever heard Pat Buchanan espouse, this pretender has turned on its head. On trade, the Pat I knew was a free-trader, who frequently invoked the memory of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of 1930, which helped deepen and expand the Great Depression. But this new fellow wants across-the-board 15 percent tariffs on all imported goods, and even higher ones on imports from poor countries. On racial quotas, the Buchanan I admired was against any and all racial quotas, goals, timetables and set asides for anyone. This other guy, well, he says maybe white Christians need a little affirmative action, too, and calls for reserving 75 percent of the slots at Harvard for non-Jewish whites.

On abortion, Pat Buchanan rarely gave a speech that didn't mention the right-to-life of the unborn, and he fought hard to keep the Republican Party's anti-abortion language in the party platform in 1996. Apparently, Pat's doppelganger will have no such compunction if he gets the Reform Party nomination, since most Reformers are pro-choice, and the party platform is silent on the subject.

And what about the company this Buchanan impersonator keeps? Would the real Pat Buchanan have deigned to lunch with a Black Power leftist turned therapist, Lenora Fulani, who once ran for president on the New Alliance Party ticket? Fulani is now a power broker in the Reform Party, where her own brand of weirdness apparently doesn't stand out, and Buchanan is said to be courting her favor in order to win the party's nomination. Who knows, maybe the whole party is made up of cyborgs plotting to take over the world.

One thing I do know is that the real Pat Buchanan has disappeared. In his place, they've left an android with a bad sense of history -- and a bleeding heart for all the wrong things.


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©1999, Creators Syndicate