Attack Of The PaleoCons

I made a new friend last summer when I got around to reading Pat Buchanan's autobiography, Right From The Beginning. While I don't agree with Mr. Buchanan on everything, I must say that his book, laced with humor and humility in its telling of his upbringing as a Catholic and a conservative, helped me to know the man behind the name. Buchanan was coming of age during the Vietnam War and it left its stamp on him. He seems to believe more often than not that America ought to leave the world to its own devices rather than going overseas to fight for other people's freedoms. And he is very reticent toward seeing how anybody elses freedom might benefit the good ol' U. S of A. This makes Buchanan a paleoconservative isolationist for the most part, if not entirely.

So, it's not very much of a surprise to see Buchanan's magazine, The American Conservative and its bold depiction of Rudy Giuliani resembling a Brown Shirted Schatz, "I, Rudy". In the centerpiece article by Michael C. Desch, Declaring Forever War, the author clangs the warning bells;

I was so appalled by the mayor’s simplistic message that terrorists were attacking us because they "oppose our freedom and ... want to impose their ideology on us" that I ignored protocol and challenged him during the Q&A. To the accompaniment of hisses from the rabidly pro-Rudy students, I reminded the mayor that Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere in the Middle East have taken our side against al-Qaeda at various times. Like the students, Hizzonor was not amused, and I got five minutes of unvarnished Rudy chiding me for just not getting it.  

 

To the cheers of the partisan crowd, Giuliani argued that my failure to see the connection between Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups [was] a recipe for disaster. In his view, the campaign of radical Islamic terrorism began back in the 1960s and 1970s and included things like the Black September attack upon Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972. He ridiculed my call to disaggregate the terrorist threat, saying it ignored the fact that Yasir Arafat, whom, he lamented, we helped win the Nobel Prize, was responsible for slaughtering 29 Americans over the years.

 

And he doesn’t stop at Iraq: Podhoretz constantly beats the drum for bombing Iran to halt its nascent nuclear program. Air Marshal Podhoretz assured The Telegraph  that the air campaign would take five minutes. His optimism that attacking Iran would be another cakewalk combines with pessimism about the prospects of multilateral sanctions preventing Iran from getting the bomb. "Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of the Jews back then," Podhoretz sneers, "the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around."

Some hope that all of this is just posturing to secure the Republican nomination, which will be delivered by a base troubled by Giuliani’s multiple marriages, occasional cross-dressing, and support for abortion, civil unions, and immigrants’ rights. A post on Matthew Yglesias’s Atlantic Monthly  blog offered a theory: "Giuliani is stocking up on these stock characters not for real advice - he’s not that insane - but rather to get out a sort of dogwhistle message to the true rightwing nuts, who are willing to forgive a guy anything if he will only pledge to nuke significant parts of the Middle East." Yglesias himself is not so sure: he thinks Rudy is "bat-s - - t insane."