Loose Buchanan

By Margaret Carlson/Washington

Pat Buchanan's announcement that he was running for President was exactly in character. He was at pains to say how much he likes George Bush. He was communications director in the Reagan-Bush Administration and has dined with the current First Family in their private White House quarters. But Buchanan has his reasons for launching a full-frontal assault against the fellow Republican he likes so much. For Buchanan, Bush is insufficiently Buchanan- like -- not nativist, rightist, homophobic, authoritarian or anti-Israel enough.

Like many ultraconservatives, Buchanan is unfailingly kind and generous to people regardless of their background. But he can be just as cruel to the groups to which they belong. To him, gays are "sodomites," the poor are "freeloaders," and immigrants from anywhere but Western Europe are a threat to the American way of life. Buchanan's remarks about Jews in particular are so provocative that his fellow panelists on TV political talk shows -- including Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal, Morton Kondracke of the New Republic and Washington Post columnist Mark Shields -- have felt the need to say publicly that their colleague is not an anti-Semite.

That issue came up during the debate over whether the U.S. should use force to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Buchanan charged that there were "only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the U.S." New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal accused Buchanan of anti-Semitism and "blood libel" (a reference to the canard leveled by bigots since the Middle Ages that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood in making Passover matzo). Rosenthal's attack was so outrageous that Buchanan survived the storm.

Now the man Buchanan reveres as his "spiritual guide" has taken Buchanan to the woodshed. In a 38,000-word essay in the National Review, William F. Buckley Jr., the godfather of conservatism, writes, "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it; most probably an iconoclastic temperament."

That iconoclastic temperament has also driven Buchanan to give sympathetic attention to crackpot Holocaust revisionists. In addition, he made intemperate comments during his crusade to prove the innocence of John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland autoworker convicted by an Israeli court of having helped murder hundreds of thousands of Jews as a Nazi death-camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible. There is considerable evidence that Buchanan may be right that Demjanjuk could not have been the mass murderer of Treblinka. But Buchanan has also claimed that diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody, much less 850,000 people at Treblinka; that the U.S. should not have apologized to France for protecting Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie; and that Arthur Rudolph, the ex-Nazi rocket scientist forced to leave the U.S. after the Justice Department accused him of brutalizing slave laborers at a Nazi rocket factory, was "railroaded."

Those views go beyond being merely pugnacious. Four years ago, Buchanan came close to running for the presidency with the slogan LET THE BLOODBATH BEGIN. It is still his motto.