A guy who has been there

Steve Malzburg of Newsmax interviews Pat Buchanan, whom he calls a treasure and a legend. Buchanan shares a few things about Richard Nixon. Did you know Nixon on domestic issues was a progressive? He ended the draft, enacted the 18-year-old vote, created EPA, indexed Social Security, created OSHA, and proposed a guaranteed annual income. In foreign policy he brought the troops home from Viet Nam, achieved an arms control agreement, opened up China to the US, and saved Israel.

Buchanan points out there is a cultural Left, political Left, and a media conglomerate that unites to damage Republican presidents. They colluded to bring down Nixon, tried to do the same to Reagan with Iran-Contra, and is now in a bloody war with Donald Trump. Nixon told him, "The press is the enemy." The press decides what people are talking about, drives the narrative, shines the spotlight on the issue they hope will bring down the person the people elected.

White House Wars

Pat Buchanan has a new book out about Nixon's White House Wars. He understands how biased the media is against Republicans and how supportive they are of Democrats. If there is an issue they think will hurt the Republican president, they remain focused on it laser-like until it damages the president as much as possible.

Another point he makes is that the American Establishment that had been ruling for decades broke up because of the Viet Nam War.

He also reminds us that Nixon won with 43 percent of the vote in 1968, but got 72 percent in 1972.

We mustn't have Friendship, now must we?

Pat Buchanan cautions that if only three Republicans vote against Rex Tillerson, he would not become Secretary of State.

When word leaked that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, a holder of the Order of Friendship award in Putin's Russia, was Donald Trump's choice for secretary of state, John McCain had this thoughtful response:

"Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully, and a murderer and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying."

Yet, Putin is something else, the leader of the largest nation on earth, a great power with enough nuclear weapons to wipe the United States off the face of the earth. And we have to deal with him.

McCain was echoed by the senior Democrat on foreign relations, Bob Menendez, who said naming Tillerson secretary of state would be "alarming and absurd ... guaranteeing Russia has a willing accomplice in the (Trump) Cabinet guiding our nation's foreign policy."

Sen Marco Rubio chimed in: "Being a 'friend of Vladimir' is not an attribute I am hoping for from a Secretary of State."

If just three GOP senators vote no on Tillerson, and Democrats vote as a bloc against him, his nomination would go down. President Trump would sustain a major and humiliating defeat.

...And here is the heart of the objection to Tillerson. He wants to end sanctions and partner with Putin's Russia, as does Trump. But among many in the mainstream media, think tanks, websites, and on the Hill, this is craven appeasement. For such as these, the Cold War is never over.

...The people who most indignantly condemned Trump's questioning of Obama's birth certificate as a scurrilous scheme to delegitimize his presidency, now seek to delegitimize Trump's presidency.

...Early in his presidency, if not before, Trump is going to have to impose his foreign policy upon his own party and, indeed, upon his own government. Or his presidency will be broken, as was Lyndon Johnson's.

A good place to begin is by accepting the McCain-Marco challenge and nominating Rex Tillerson for secretary of state. Let's get it on.

Pat: he did!
Read more here.

What happens on November 9?

Who lost America?

Are you following the war between the Wall Street Journal and writer Pat Buchanan? The Journal started it with this lead editorial:

Here we go again. In the 1990s Pat Buchanan launched a civil war within the Republican Party on a platform targeting immigration and trade. Some claimed Pitchfork Pat was the future of the GOP, though in the end he mainly contributed to its presidential defeats.

...This is no way to rebuild a conservative majority. What America’s working families need most after the Obama era is a healthy, vibrant and growing economy that creates more jobs, increases paychecks and expands opportunity. A trade deal that would help open up a market of one billion people to the goods and services produced by the American worker is an excellent place to start.

Pat Buchanan responds by asking, who really lost America?

Now it is true that, while Nixon and Reagan won 49-state landslides and gave the GOP five victories in six presidential contests, the party has fallen upon hard times. Only once since 1988 has a Republican presidential nominee won the popular vote. But was this caused by following this writer’s counsel? Or by the GOP listening to the deceptions of its Davos-Doha-Journal wing?

In the 1990s, this writer and allies in both parties fought NAFTA, GATT, and MFN for China. The Journal and GOP establishment ran with Bill and Hillary and globalization. And the fruits of their victory?

Between 2000 and 2010, 55,000 U.S. factories closed and 5 million to 6 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. Columnist Terry Jeffrey writes that, since 1979, the year of maximum U.S. manufacturing employment, “The number of jobs in manufacturing has declined by 7,231,000 — or 37 percent.”

Does the Journal regard this gutting of the greatest industrial base the world had ever seen, which gave America an independence no republic had ever known, an acceptable price of its New World Order?

Beginning in 1991, traveling the country and visiting plant after plant that was shutting down or moving to Asia or Mexico, some of us warned that this economic treason against America’s workers would bring about political retribution. And so it came to pass. Since 1988, a free-trade Republican Party has not once won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, or Wisconsin in a presidential election. Ohio, the other great Midwest industrial state, is tipping. The Reagan Democrats are gone. Who cast them aside? You or us?

Since the early 1990s, we have run $3 billion to $4 billion in trade deficits with China. Last year’s was $325 billion, or twice China’s defense budget. Are not all those factories, jobs, investment capital, and consumer dollars pouring into China a reason why Beijing has been able to build mighty air and naval fleets, claim sovereignty over the South and East China seas, fortify reefs 1,000 miles south of Hainan Island, and tell the U.S. Navy to back off?

The Journal accuses us of being anti-growth. But as trade surpluses add to a nation’s GDP, trade deficits subtract from it. Does the Journal think our $11 trillion in trade deficits since 1992 represents a pro-growth policy?

On immigration, this writer did campaign on securing the border in 1991-92, when there were 3 million illegal immigrants in the United States. But the Bush Republicans refused to seal the border. Now there are 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants and the issue is tearing the party apart. Now everybody is for “secure borders.”

We did urge a “moratorium” on legal immigration, such as America had from 1924 to 1965, to assimilate and Americanize the millions who had come. The Journal Republicans called that xenophobia. Since then, tens of millions of immigrants, here legally and illegally, mostly from the Third World, have arrived. Economically, they consume more in tax dollars than they contribute. Politically, most belong to ethnic groups that vote between 70 and 90 percent Democratic. Their children will bury the GOP.

Consider California, which voted for Nixon all five times he was on a national ticket and for Reagan in landslides all four times he ran. Since 1988, California has not gone Republican in a single presidential election. No Republican holds statewide office. Both U.S. Senators are Democrats. Democrats have 39 of 53 U.S. House seats. Republican state legislators are outnumbered 2-to-1.

Americans of European descent, who provide the GOP with 90 percent of its presidential vote, are down to 63 percent of the nation and falling. By 2042, they will be a minority. And there goes the GOP.

Lest we forget, the “Buchanan wing” also opposed the invasion of Iraq while the Journal-War Party wing howled, “Onto Baghdad!” ”Unpatriotic Conservatives,” we were called in a cover story by a neocon National Review for saying the war was unnecessary and unwise. Now, a dozen years after the “cakewalk” war, GOP candidates like Marco Rubio and Bush III are trying to figure out what it was all about, Alfie, and what they would have done, had they only known.

Our agenda in that decade was—stay out of wars that are not our business, economic patriotism, secure borders, and America first.

The foreign debt and de-industrialization of America, the trillion-dollar wars and the chaos of the Middle East, the shortened life span of the Party of Reagan, that’s your doing, fellas, not ours.