Some people, as they age, grow more gracious and large-spirited. Others become embittered and increasingly lash out at the world and others. And the very worst become like Patrick J. Buchanan.
Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic drew attention to a recent column by Buchanan about John Demjanjuk, who is to stand trial in Germany for his alleged role in the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. According to Buchanan, John Demjanjuk is to “serve as the sacrificial lamb whose blood washes away the stain of Germany’s sins.” He is to be, in Buchanan’s words, “punish[ed] in expiation for Germany’s sins.” And Buchanan adds this: “The spirit behind this un-American persecution has never been that of justice tempered by mercy. It is the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago.”
This is really all quite ugly. For Buchanan, a Catholic, to compare Demjanjuk to Jesus — who, according to Christian belief, was deity, holy and without sin — is strikingly offensive. So is his effort to revive the charge of blood libel. Rarely do you find such an obscene mix of blasphemy and bigotry, and all in less than 900 words.
William F. Buckley, Jr. did many great deeds on behalf of conservatism over the course of his life. Near the top of the list was when he said in 1991 that he found it “impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what [Buchanan] did and said during the period under examination [the first Gulf War] amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it.”
Things have only gotten worse since. Hatreds and prejudices that appear to have been bubbling underneath the surface in the past have surged forth in full public view. Such things are never pretty to see, but they are important to recognize — and condemn.
Murtha can join his colleague Fumo in jail if found guilty.
Obama-ites. Read the second to last paragraph very closely. Have you been listening to China?
Our president will now have a decision to make – are we to become a has been or not? His current next year budget proposal will make us destitute. I hate to go in for all that RCAR likes to talk about fiat currency and the like, but in this case his arguments have a significant attachment to the truth. The currency is about to be made worthless.
How would YOU like to be the new RNC PR guy? First of all, he has to explain the peculiar chairman to the world. I presume he comes from the hip-hop world, or at least can relate to the artists.
“A really good point: the Obama team excuses AIG because of the sanctity of contracts but has no problem abrogating the same in bankruptcy court.”
I still can’t get over this.
First, that a Harvard trained lawyer, and his entourage of ivy league lawyers, can’t find some way around these contracts. That’s exactly what so many businesses pay their classmates in the private sector so much for every day.
Second, that the most powerful man in the world can’t drive this one home over AIG and some EVPs known only to their mothers. What CEO with an ounce of self-respect or any future in his job would ever say — I’ll give it shot. No, he says — Done. And then does it.
And give me a break about the sanctity of contracts. Within the first month of Harvard Law School, you learn about the efficient breach — that contracts are not moral covenants and when circumstances change, it is not only privately desireable but publicly beneficial to get out of certain contracts and even breach them if necessary.
The Eric HZolder link is a no-go. Conspiracy? Or Webtarded Jennifer?
the definitive statement onf freman-gate
“March 17, 2009
Of Patriots and Assassins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
During Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972, his interpreter and I, free for a few hours, conscripted a driver to take us on a tour of Beijing. Somewhere in my files are photos from that day we toured the grim city of Chairman Mao in the time of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The interpreter: Charles Freeman – the same Charles Freeman Adm. Dennis Blair chose to chair the National Intelligence Council that prepares National Intelligence Estimates on critical national security issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.
Educated at Yale and Harvard Law, Freeman has served his country in Delhi, Taipei, Bangkok, and Beijing. He was Ronald Reagan’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa and Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. George Bush I named him ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Freeman was our man in Riyadh when Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and 500,000 U.S. troops arrived to evict the army of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
In 1997, Freeman succeeded George McGovern as president of the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) – and he began to speak out.
He opposed the bombing of Serbia and said aloud what few privately deny: Reflexive support for Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people is high among the reasons America is no longer seen as a beacon of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world.
Freeman echoed the Obama of yesterday, who bravely blurted, “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”
At MEPC, however, Freeman committed a great crime. He published The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, which went onto the New York Times bestseller list – and put Freeman on AIPAC’s enemies list.
Hence, when his name surfaced as Blair’s choice to chair the NIC, the Israel Firsters went berserk, with Steven Rosen declaring him to be a “textbook case of the old-line Arabism” that infected the Department of State when Gen. George Marshall was secretary.
And who is Rosen?
A former fixture at AIPAC, Rosen faces imminent federal criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act for transferring top-secret Pentagon documents to the Israeli embassy. Rosen’s accomplice, Larry Franklin, is serving a 12-year sentence.
Picking up the Rosen dog whistle, the neocommentariat came howling. To Gabriel Schoenfeld, late of Commentary, Freeman is a “China-coddling Israel basher.” Tom Piatak of Chronicles found no fewer than five blogs from National Review Online, in two hours, savaging Freeman, two by Jonah Goldberg and two by Michael Rubin.
Rich Lowry of NR calls Freeman “Chas of Arabia,” a diplomat of “odious” views, a “lap dog” and “blinkered ideologue” who enjoys “pandering to and making excuses for the world’s dictators and terrorists.”
To The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, Freeman is a “fanatic.” To Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, formerly of the Israeli army, Chait’s piece was dead on. To TNR ex-publisher Marty Peretz, Freeman is a “bought man.” To Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard, Freeman is a “shill for the Saudis,” who defends “corrupt Arab states that foment and support terror.”
Freeman is denounced as a shill of Saudi Arabia – by people who have spent careers shilling for the Israeli lobby and Likud.
Within this smear bund (Murray Rothbard’s phrase), who has given America a tenth of the patriotic service and loyalty of Chas Freeman?
What were the specific charges? That, in private life, Freeman advised a Chinese company. Would the Israel Firsters have used that argument against Al Haig or Henry Kissinger?
Saudi contributions to MEPC should disqualify Freeman, they say. But what did they say when Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and the rest with inextricable ties to Israel stove-piped to the press the cherry-picked War Party propaganda lies about a “Prague connection” between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence, yellow cake from Niger, Saddam and al-Qaeda, Saddam and the anthrax attacks, “mushroom clouds,” “aluminum tubes,” and WMDs?
Who among them questioned State’s decision to hand the Iran portfolio to Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a creation of and front for AIPAC?
Realizing the assaults would not end, Freeman last week withdrew, saying, “I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction of a foreign country.”
The foreign country is Israel; the political faction Likud.
Nor did Freeman shrink at naming the source of the noxious campaign of slander against him.
“The tactics of the Israel lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth.”
“A lobby,” Steve Rosen confided in an AIPAC internal memo, “is like a night flower; it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”
Yes, and long ago, Al Smith addressed the age-old problem of the Rosens within: “The best way to kill anything un-American is to drag it out into the open, because anything un-American cannot live in the sunlight.”
Well done, Ambassador Freeman. “
lol it’s also the “definitive statement on Freeman-gate” sorry sp
Lester needs better bathroom reading matter.
Conrad sounds like a Republican, or a conservative? Sadly, there’s a big difference.
How appropriate that it should be Fester who jumps to the defense of the man-who-would-be intelligence-king/czar, Effendi Charlie Freeman.One would have been quite shocked, in fact, had his character testimonial to good ole Charlie come to us sans attempts to discount, hide or ignore, in toto, CF’s longstanding Chinese and Saudi paymaster’s gentle little tugs at the strings of his heart, not to mention at various other anatomical replicas of their best lil puppet’s moving parts, by seeking to deflect Charlie Baby’s extremely unsavoury and unwholesome relationships through engaging in the same-old-same-old attacks on the you-know whooooose [ hint:rhymes with psuedo NYT news]
As for Freeman side-kick Roger cohen, is absolute stupidity, contempt and and self -hatred for both Israel and America, really an absolute prerequisite for getting hired at the NY Times? What can one say, other than to perhaps again refer you, dear reader, to the Philip Roth novel ” The Plot Against America ” and to its pathetic, and, one might say, not all that fictional character, “Rabbi” Bengelsdorf, aka “Lionel”.The only problem with Roth’s depiction, it seems to this writer, is that he gets his descriptions of wrongheaded political sentiment and party affiliation wrong, at least in today’s context.
cohen, who stakes his defense of the good intentions of the Iranian beeples on his observations and deep insights gained into the souls of these “ordinary folks” whom he just happened across, during his “unsupervised” and unmonitored three week sojourn in Shi’ite Paradise, as well as from his close encounters with the 11th, 12th and 13th Missing Imams [though not necessarily in that order] provides a whole heap of solid evidence that we can safely now rely on, in all future dealings with the Iranians.
cohen’s infantile thesis about his Magical Mystery Tour of Iran, as also his Big Lie protestations regarding the safety and status of Iran’s Jews, Bahais, members of other faith communities, Women, Homosexuals [OK, I'll grant you, on this one, that if big A says that there aren't actually any in Iran, why then, clearly,this coming from a man of such impeccable reputation, well then, there certainly aren't any, of course.] And, if big A’s declaration it should turn out is not quite yet the case at the present time, well, there are certainly ways and means to make it so, not so?]
Thus, cohen’s quite incredible prostitution of the truth in mitigating the crimes of one of the contenders for “most vile creature on earth”, together with his fella mullahs, in his address to Rabbi Wolpe’s congregation, can only but miniaturize, by comparison, and in its degree of wilful deception, that other recent, masterful, sterling guide to future Iranian national conduct, known as the infamous NIE Report, which also sought to proffer to the ranks of the great unwashed, that obtaining a nuclear weapon post 2003, and the almost certain intention in the minds of the Great A et al to use it against Israel, at some point in the future, if given half a chance to do so, was the last thing on the minds of the Iranian beeple.
I can’t help but also be reminded, at this time, of another “yehudon” [also a graduate of the "Jewboy" advanced fellowship program offererd at the Kim Philby School of National Service [I was born in England, but I sure as hell owe no special allegiance to anyone or any place, other than to myself and my own personal career advancement] situate somewheres on J Street, USA.
This particular Court Jew, his cowardly, self-serving and unctuous behaviour towards those who would cause great harm, if they could, to his [most recent] well, to one of his collection of “most recent” assorted” Homeland[s]“, was also unmasked, as such, just before “Gandhi’s” murder, by one of the loving and kind Palis with whom aforesaid Court Jew would have had Israel “work with him” as he aided and abetted in getting the next genocide of the Jewsh people underway.
I must say, then, that I have not been this disgusted and ashamed at the the unchanging nature of those few “court jews for hire”, who have continued to play lethal and very damaging games with the lives of the Jewish People, from the days of Shabtai Tsvi, to the days of the Judenrat, the Kapos and Stalin’s numerous [Jewish] Useful Idiots, who actively assisted in the humiliation and degradation rites, and the subsequent mass murder unleashed against their own, by the worst human actors we, and the rest of the world, have ever had to deal with
Way to go, cohen.For absolute shame on you.