The man Conservatives love to hate: Pat Buchanan

You have to see this video to believe it!



It’s not just the liberals who are against Pat Buchanan.

When it comes to the issue of foreign policy, the conservatives are against him as well. Most all of them.

With the exception of Ron Paul, the current and former Republican presidential candidates are against him – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain. And so are previous candidates like John McCain and Sarah Palin

Conservative magazines are against him. Publications like National Review and the Weekly Standard.

Conservative think tanks are against him. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

Conservative talk show hosts are against him. Levin, Hannity, O’Reilly, Limbaugh – take your pick.

Republicans in the House are against him, including the leaders: John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy.

Republicans in the Senate are against him, including the leaders: Mitch McConnell and John Kyl.

Other members of Congress are against him – like interventionist, warmonger, and imperial vulture Lindsey Graham.

Conservatives in general are against him. At the recent CPAC presidential straw poll, Ron Paul received only 12 percent of the vote. It is Congressman Paul’s views on foreign policy – which are very similar to Buchanan’s – that are unconscionable to most of the conservatives in attendance.

Republican primary voters in general are against him. Most of them are picking warmonger A, imperialist B, or militarist C instead of noninterventionist Ron Paul…


The empire should have been dismantled after the Cold War:

Liquidation of this empire should have begun at the end of the Cold War. Now it is being forced upon us by a deficit-debt crisis that the cost of that empire helped to produce. We cannot continue to kick the can up the road, for we have come to the end of the road.

As Russia had gone home, some of us urged back then, America should come home, cede NATO and all the U.S. bases in Europe to the Europeans, and become again what UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick called "a normal country in a normal time."

But instead,

George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan, declared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an "axis of evil," warned the world that we would maintain military supremacy in every vital region of the globe, declared a Bush Doctrine of preventive war and used it to invade and occupy an Iraq that had never threatened or attacked us, and launched a global crusade for democracy that feature demonstrations to dump over governments install pro-American regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Lebanon, as Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA had done in Iran in 1953.

Clinton and Bush II pushed NATO right up to Russia’s front porch, bringing six former Warsaw Pact nations – East Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Romania – and three Baltic states that had been part of the Soviet Union into an alliance created to contain Russia. Only European resistance stopped Bush II from putting Ukraine and Georgia on a fast track to NATO membership, which would have meant that should there be a Moscow-Tbilisi clash, American would instantly be eyeball to eyeball with a nation possessing thousands of nuclear weapons.

Barack Obama doubled U.S. forces in Afghanistan, began done strikes in Pakistan, and launched a war on Libya.

Buchanan then asks: "And what has all this compulsive interventionism availed us?" And then answers: "We are less secure, less respected, less confident, and less powerful than we were in 1991." And then asks again: "And is the world a better place?" The answer, of course, is a resounding no.


Recognizing the disastrous consequences of the Iraq and Afghan wars, Buchanan sees no point in threatening Iran over its non-existent nuclear weapon’s program:

The immediate goal must be to derail the War Party campaign to have America launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities that would trigger acts of terror against U.S. soldiers and civilians from Baghdad to Beirut. An early result of such a war could be the closing of the Persian Gulf, crippling the U.S. and world economies.

If America could deter the Russia of Stalin and the China of Mao, who declared himself willing to lose three hundred million Chinese, why can’t we deter an Iran that has no bomb and no missile to deliver it? Lew Rockwell

“The difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the pessimist is usually better informed.”

Every time I do a post on or by Pat Buchanan, there is some comment about Buchanan's character or his worthiness to be heard. The Belmont Club was loaded with effete Buchanan detractors. Buchanan would be called a racist or an anti-semite. Rarely would he be attacked for the specifics of his opinion or argument. Mostly, his detractors avoid specifics because they have paltry evidence to contradict him. Here is a book review on Buchanan's latest book and his dangerous truths:
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SUICIDE OF A SUPERPOWER: WILL AMERICA SURVIVE TO 2025?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Thomas Dunne, 488 pages, $27.99

Reviewed by Brett M. Decker Washington Times

I went to a dealership last weekend to check out an All-American muscle car, but it didn’t turn out to be all-American at all. As listed on the window sticker, the domestic content was only 55 percent. The transmission, one of the most important components on the vehicle - especially for a performance machine - was manufactured in China. On the same day, I dropped into a hardware store to pick up a box of nails, and they were all made in the People’s Republic, too. After a long day of trying to avoid purchasing products made by the communist Chinese, I settled down at home to eat a refreshing fruit cup. When I flipped the plastic container over to check out the nutritional information, there it was in black and white and all capital letters: PRODUCT OF CHINA. The reds had invaded my refrigerator.

Book Cover: Patrick J. Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower

It doesn’t matter what you want; almost every consumer product on U.S. store shelves is made overseas, especially in China. It doesn’t matter how much you want to find it; almost nothing you need is made in the USA. From expensive manufactured equipment to swank plasma TVs to the simplest munchies for a kid’s lunchbox, that “Product ofChina” label is stamped on it all. Try taking the China Test for a month or two - maybe even a year. Any time you buy anything, flip it over and read the label to see if it was made in the Middle Kingdom. The results of a thorough China Test can be startling: Americans are dependent on the Maoist state for the necessities of life. Obviously, this dynamic cannot work forever. Eventually, a nation needs to produce something it can sell to have the revenue to consume anything - and America is making less all the time.

In his new blockbuster book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” Patrick J. Buchanan chronicles the demise of American manufacturing. “From 2000 to 2010, America saw 50,000 factories close and 6 million manufacturing jobs disappear,” he writes. “Manufacturing, 27 percent of the U.S. economy in 1950, is down to 11 percent and accounts for only 9 percent of the non-farm labor force.” This is not only bad for the working class because service jobs pay half as much on average as manufacturing jobs, it is dangerous for national security as well. Military contractors are dependent on parts made abroad, which means America’s ability to project force is tied to foreign suppliers whose interests might not always coincide with our own. “The defense industry has been off-shored,” warned former South Carolina Sen. Fritz Hollings. “Today, we can’t go to war except for the favor of a foreign country.”

There are countless national policies that put U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage in their own land and chase jobs overseas. Onerous federal taxes on income made abroad mean companies don’t bring cash home which could be invested in creating jobs. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, Michigan Republican, estimates $1 trillion in U.S. corporate money is sitting in foreign bank accounts to avoid tax penalties here. That’s treasure not going to domestic research-and-development or facilities expansion. Backward labor laws also make it more expensive for the Big Three domestic automobile manufacturers to produce cars in America than foreign firms, which are free to set up in cheaper nonunion southern states without fear of a national strike. On top of all this is the fact that China can break every trade law on the books and nothing is done about it. These are policies of a nation that’s no longer serious about being competitive.

Meanwhile, as millions upon millions of private-sector jobs disappear, the government leviathan continues to grow unabated. In 1960, 8.7 million people worked for the government; today that number has ballooned to 22.5 million. “Between the passage of Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009 and September 2010, millions of private-sector jobs disappeared but 416,000 new government jobs were created,” Mr. Buchanan reports. On average, federal employees earn about $62,000 more per year than workers in the private sector. The burgeoning bureaucracy and all its big-government programs don’t come cheap and have brought the world’s most productive economy to the brink of bankruptcy.

Once the world’s largest creditor, now America is the biggest debtor nation in history. We are running trillion-plus-dollar deficits every year that add to a national debt closing in fast on $15 trillion. A nation is not free when it owes so much because there are strings attached when a foreign power maintains such a large financial stake in another state. Beijing, for example, owns over $1.2 trillion in U.S. debt, which gives it sway over U.S. affairs. The debt jam leads to worry that Washington will either go into default or inflate like crazy to be able to pay off debt with dollars worth much less. Both are options of a seriously diminished economy and will lead to punishing consequences for taxpayers. If liberal Democrats had their way and used revenue increases to balance the budget, taxes on everybody would have to go up by 67 percent.

America’s national crisis is a failure of leadership. Although the country is about to drive over the cliff, our elected representatives have proven incapable of taking action to change directions. We see the problems and understand the crisis but no longer have the will to do what’s right. President Obama has admitted that “At no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy,” yet his policies have gutted the U.S. economy to its worst condition since the Great Depression. Clare Booth Luce quipped that, “The difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the pessimist is usually better informed.” Pat Buchanan’s new book provides all the information anyone needs to be pessimistic about the future.

Brett M. Decker is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. He is coauthor of the new book “Bowing to Beijing” (Regnery, 2011).

"Time to start looking out for America and Americans first."

The End of Pax Americana?

Patrick J. Buchanan     October 6th, 2011     

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Observing the correlation of forces in this city and the intensity of conviction in the base of each party, the outcome of the ongoing fiscal fight between Barack Obama and the Tea Party Republicans seems preordained.

Deadlock. There will be no big jobs-for-taxes deal. The can will be kicked down the road into the next administration.

A second truth is emerging. When the cutting comes, as it shall, the Pentagon will be first to ascend the scaffold.

Why so? Consider.

The Republican House cannot agree to tax increases without risking retribution from the base and repudiation by its presidential candidates. All have pledged to oppose even a dollar in tax hikes for 10 dollars in spending cuts.

For his part, Obama has refused to lay out any significant cuts in the big Democratic entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare.

As for the hundreds of billions in Great Society spending for Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, earned income tax credits, aid to education, Pell grants and housing subsidies, neither Harry Reid’s Senate nor Obama, in trouble with his African-American base, will permit significant cuts.

That leaves two large items of a budget approaching $4 trillion: interest on the debt, which must be paid, and national defense.

Pentagon chief Leon Panetta can see the writing on the wall.

Defense is already scheduled for $350 billion in cuts over the decade. If the super-committee fails to come up with $1.2 trillion in specified new cuts, an automatic slicer chops another $600 billion from defense.

House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon has issued an analysis of what that would mean: a U.S. Army and Marine Corps reduction of 150,000 troops, retirement of two carrier battle groups, loss of one-third of Air Force fighter planes and a “hollow force” unable to meet America’s commitments.

Also on the chopping block would be the Navy and Marine Corps versions of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. If the super-committee trigger has to be pulled, says Panetta, “we’d be shooting ourselves in the head.”

That half defense-half domestic formula for automatic budget cuts was programmed into the slicer to force Republicans to put tax hikes on the table. They will refuse. For tax hikes would do more damage to the party than the slicing would the Pentagon.

Thus America approaches her moment of truth.

Thanks to the irresponsibility of both parties, of the Bush as well as Obama administrations, we are facing unavoidable and painful choices.

We are going to have to reduce the benefits and raise the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. Cut and cap Great Society programs. Downsize the military, close bases and transfer to allies responsibility for their own defense. Or we are going to have to raise taxes — and not just on millionaires and billionaires, but Middle America.

And if our leaders cannot impose these sacrifices, the markets will, as we see in Europe, where the day of reckoning is at hand. Ours is next.

But if defense cuts are unavoidable, where should they come? What should our future defense posture be? Which principles should apply?

Clearly, the first principle should be that the United States must retain a sufficiency, indeed, a surplus of power to defend all of its vital interests and vital allies, though the defense of those allies must be first and foremost their own responsibility. They have to replace U.S. troops as first responders.

During the Cold War, America was committed to go to war on behalf of a dozen NATO nations from Norway to Turkey. Eastern Europe under Moscow’s boot was not considered vital.

Thus we resisted the Berlin Blockade, but peacefully. We did nothing to rescue the Hungarian revolution in 1956, or the Prague Spring in 1968, or the Polish Solidarity movement in 1981, when all three were crushed.

Now that the Red Army has gone home, Eastern Europe is free, and the Soviet Union no longer exists, what is the argument for maintaining U.S. Air Force, Army and naval bases and thousands of U.S. troops in Europe?

Close the bases, and bring the troops home.

The same with South Korea and Japan. Now that Mao is dead and gone and China is capitalist, Seoul and Tokyo trade more with Beijing than they do with us.

South Korea has 40 times the economy and twice the population of North Korea. Japan’s economy is almost as large as China’s. Why cannot these two powerful and prosperous nations provide the troops, planes, ships and missiles to defend themselves? We can sell them whatever they need.

Why is their defense still our responsibility?

In the Persian Gulf we have a strategic interest: oil. But the oil-rich nations of the region have an even greater interest in selling their oil than we do in buying it. For, without oil sales, the Gulf has little the world needs or wants.

Let the world look out for itself for a while. Time to start looking out for America and Americans first. For if we don’t, who will?

Patrick J. Buchanan is a TAC founding editor and the author, most recently, of Suicide of a Superpower. A preview from the Suicide of a Superpower audiobook, read by the author, can be heard here, courtesy of Macmillan Audio:

Suicide of a Superpower Clip

The GOP should stand its ground -- and fix bayonets.

July 8, 2011

An Establishment in Panic

By Pat Buchanan

By refusing to accept tax increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans are behaving like "fanatics," writes David Brooks of The New York Times.

Anti-tax Republicans "have no sense of moral decency," he adds.

They are "willing to stain their nation's honor" to "worship their idol." If this "deal of the century" goes down, as he calls the Barack Obama offer, "Republican fanaticism" will be the cause.

"The GOP has become a cult" that has replaced reason with "feverish" and "cockamamie beliefs," writes Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. The Republican "presidential field (is) a virtual political Jonestown," the Guyana site where more than 900 followers of the Peoples Temple drank the Kool-Aid that Rev. Jim Jones mixed for them.

Does anyone think this an appropriate description of such mild-mannered men as Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman?

"The GOP's Hezbollah Wing Is Now Fully in Control," screams The New Republic over a recent lead editorial.

Other columnists charge the GOP with holding America "hostage" by refusing to accept tax hikes to avert a default on the debt.

What to make of this hysteria?

The Establishment is in a panic. It has been jolted awake to the realization that the GOP House, if it can summon the courage to use it, is holding a weapon that could enable it to bridle forever the federal monster that consumes 25 percent of gross domestic product.

To bully and blackmail the GOP into surrendering the weapon and betraying its principles and signing on to new taxes, that establishment has unleashed rhetoric more befitting a war on terror than a political dispute.

For how, exactly, are Republicans threatening the republic?

The House has not said it will not raise the debt ceiling. It must and will. It has not said it will not accept budget cuts. It has indicated a willingness to accept the budget cuts agreed to in the Biden negotiations.

Where the GOP has stood its ground is on tax increases.

Is fanaticism behind this stance? Does this manifest insanity? How does this imperil the nation's honor and future?

Behind the GOP opposition to tax hikes is the party's word given to the country that elected it in 2010, its political principles, its traditional view of what not to do when the nation is in a slump, and party history.

Fully 235 Republican House members signed a 2010 pledge not to raise taxes. And by giving their word they were rewarded with victory.

Should they now dishonor that pledge, what would differentiate them from George H.W. Bush, who famously promised in 1988: "Read my lips! No new taxes!" then went back on his word and took the party down to defeat with him?

Second, the GOP is the party of small government and low taxes.

Why would it agree to raise taxes on the private productive sector when federal spending, now at a peacetime record of 25 percent of GDP, is the problem?

Third, America is in a slump, with 9 percent of the workforce unemployed, another 7 percent underemployed and the economy growing at a tepid 1.8 percent.

What school of economic thought -- Keynesian, supply-side or monetarist -- says raising taxes in a slumping economy is the recipe for a return to prosperity? There is no such school.

Why, when the whole country is talking about the need to create jobs, would Congress raise taxes on a private productive sector that employs six in seven Americans and is the creator of real jobs?

In 1982, President Reagan agreed to the same deal being offered the party today: three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in tax increases to which he assented. As he ruefully told this writer more than once, he was lied to. He got one dollar in spending cuts for every three in tax increases.

What of the charge that the Republican House is holding America hostage, blackmailing the nation with a suicidal threat to throw us all into national default if it does not get its way?

This smear is the precise opposite of the truth.

The Republican Party has not said it will refuse to raise the debt ceiling. It has an obligation to do so, and will.

The House has simply said it will not accept new taxes on a nation whose fiscal crisis comes from overspending.

If the GOP keeps its word, raises the debt ceiling and accepts budget cuts agreed to in the Biden negotiations, the only people who can prevent the debt ceiling's being raised are Senate Democrats or Obama, in which case, they, not the GOP, will have thrown the nation into default.

It is the establishment that is resorting to extortion, saying, in effect, to the House GOP: Give us the new taxes we demand, or Obama will veto the debt ceiling and we will all blame you for the default.

They're bluffing.

The GOP should stand its ground -- and fix bayonets.

Every modern nation that rose to world power did so by sheltering and nurturing its manufacturing and industrial base.

Dismantling America
Posted on March 11th, 2010 by Patrick J. Buchanan
American Conservative

Though Bush 41 and Bush 43 often disagreed, one issue did unite them both with Bill Clinton: protectionism.

Globalists all, they rejected any federal measure to protect America’s industrial base, economic independence or the wages of U.S. workers.

Together they rammed through NAFTA, brought America under the World Trade Organization, abolished tariffs and granted Chinese-made goods unrestricted access to the immense U.S. market.

Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services has compiled, in 44 pages of charts and graphs, the results of two decades of this Bush-Clinton experiment in globalization. His compilation might be titled, “Indices of the Industrial Decline and Fall of the United States.”

From 2000 to 2009, industrial production declined here for the first time since the 1930s. Gross domestic product also fell, and we actually lost jobs.

In traded goods alone, we ran up $6.2 trillion in deficits — $3.8 trillion of that in manufactured goods.
Things that we once made in America — indeed, we made everything — we now buy from abroad with money that we borrow from abroad.

Over this Lost Decade, 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, one of every three we had in Y2K, disappeared. That unprecedented job loss was partly made up by adding 1.9 million government workers.

The last decade was the first in history where government employed more workers than manufacturing, a stunning development to those of us who remember an America where nearly one-third of the U.S. labor force was producing almost all of our goods and much of the world’s, as well.

Not to worry, we hear, the foreign products we buy are toys and low-tech goods. We keep the high-tech jobs here in the U.S.A.

Sorry. U.S. trade surpluses in advanced technology products ended in Bush’s first term. The last three years we have run annual trade deficits in ATP of nearly $70 billion with China alone.

About our dependency on Mideast oil we hear endless wailing.

Yet most of our imported oil comes from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Angola. And for every dollar we send abroad for oil or gas, we send $4.20 abroad for manufactured goods. Why is a dependency on the Persian Gulf for a fraction of the oil we consume more of a danger than a huge growing dependency on China for the necessities of our national life?

How great is that dependency?

China accounts for 83 percent of the U.S. global trade deficit in manufactures and 84 percent of our global trade deficit in electronics and machinery.

Over the last decade, our total trade deficit with China in manufactured goods was $1.75 trillion, which explains why China, its cash reserves approaching $3 trillion, holds the mortgage on America.

This week came a report that Detroit, forge and furnace of the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II, is considering razing a fourth of the city and turning it into farm and pastureland. Did the $1.2 trillion trade deficit we ran in autos and parts last decade help kill Detroit?

And if our purpose with NAFTA was to assist our neighbor Mexico, consider. Textile and apparel imports from China are now five times the dollar value of those imports from Mexico and Canada combined.

As exports are added to a nation’s GDP, and a trade deficit subtracted, the U.S. trade deficits that have averaged $500 billion to $600 billion a year for 10 years represent the single greatest factor pulling the United States down and raising China up into a rival for world power.

Yet what is as astonishing as these indices of American decline is the indifference, the insouciance of our political class. Do they care?

How can one explain it?

Ignorance of history is surely one explanation. How many know that every modern nation that rose to world power did so by sheltering and nurturing its manufacturing and industrial base — from Britain under the Acts of Navigation to 1850, to protectionist America from the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties, to Bismarck’s Germany before World War I, to Stalin’s Russia, to postwar Japan, to China today?

No nation rose to world power on free trade. From Britain after 1860 to America after 1960, free trade has been the policy of powers that put consumption before production and today before tomorrow.

Nations rise on economic nationalism; they descend on free trade.

Ideology is another explanation. Even a (Milton) Friedmanite free-trader should be able to see the disaster all around us and ask: What benefit does America receive from these mountains of imported goods to justify the terrible damage done to our country and countrymen?

Can they not see the correlation between the trade deficits and relative decline?

Republicans seem certain to benefit from the nation’s economic crisis this November. But is there any evidence they have learned anything about economics from the disastrous Bush decade?

Do they have any ideas for a wholesale restructuring of U.S. trade and tax policy, for a course correction to prevent America’s continuing decline?

Has anyone seen any evidence of it?

'A paralyzed government will drift closer toward the maelstrom.'

Is This How Democracy Ends?

By Patrick J. Buchanan
Vdare

"I used to think it would take a great financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one," said G. William Hoagland, a former adviser to the Senate Republican leadership on fiscal policy.

"These days, I wonder if this country is even governable."

Quoted in The New York Times' lead story, Party Gridlock Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis (by Jackie Calmes, February 16, 2010), Hoagland nailed it.

America faces a crisis of democracy.

At its heart is a fiscal crisis. After the 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion, we are running a 2010 deficit of $1.6 trillion. Trillion-dollar deficits are projected through the Obama years, be they four or eight.

Long before 2016, however, holders of U.S. public debt will stop buying Treasury bills or start demanding higher interest rates to cover the growing risk of a default.

This week, a smoke detector went off. China, in December, had unloaded $45 billion of its $790 billion in T-bills. Is Beijing is bailing out?

To assure the world we are not Greece writ large, the United States must soon adopt a visible plan for slashing the deficit.

There are three ways to do it. One is through growth that increases the tax revenue flowing into the Treasury and reduces the outflow for safety net programs like unemployment insurance.

But growth only comes slowly and can take us only so far.

Needed is a combination of big budget cuts and tax hikes. But the only place one can get budget cuts of the magnitude required is from the big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And the only place to get revenue of that magnitude is by raising taxes on the American middle class.

And here is where Barack Obama hits the wall.

Republicans are not going to give him a single vote for a tax increase. Not only would this violate a commitment most made to the people who elected them, it would be politically suicidal. For behind the GOP today, and its best hope of recapturing Congress in 2010, are the Tea Party irregulars.

And Tea Partiers now play the role of Red Army commissars who sat at machine guns behind their own troops to shoot down any soldier who retreated or ran. Republicans who sign on to tax hikes cannot go home again.

Consider: Arlen Specter voted for the Obama stimulus and faced an immediate primary challenge from Pat Toomey, who took a 20-point lead, forcing Specter to quit the party to survive. Popular Gov. Charlie Crist embraced Obama on a Florida visit and got an immediate primary challenge from Marco Rubio, who now looks to be the next senator from Florida.

The Tea Party folks are not into the Gerald Ford politics of compromise and consensus. They have seen what it produces: the inexorable growth of Government.

Ex-Sen. Alan Simpson, a Republican and co-chair of Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, has challenged the patriotism of conservatives who plant their feet in concrete.

"There isn't a single sitting member of Congress—not one—that doesn't know exactly where we're headed. ... And to use the politics of fear and hate and division on each other—we're at a point right now where it doesn't make a damn whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, if you've forgotten you're an American."

Simpson is right in his assertion that anti-tax Republicans went along with George W. Bush's spending spree—for two wars, prescription drug benefits under Medicare and No Child Left Behind.

Where he is mistaken is in suggesting "fear and hate" are behind the opposition to tax hikes. History, principle and honest politics explain much of that hostility.

Ronald Reagan, who consented to tax hikes in the 1982 TEFRA bill, told this writer he was swindled. Promised three dollars in spending cuts for each dollar in tax increases, he got the reverse.

George H.W. Bush won election by pledging: "Read my lips! No new taxes!" He broke his pledge, leaving many of the faithful with egg all over their faces. That may have cost him the presidency.

Principled conservatives are resisting tax hikes because they believe government has grown too huge for the good of the country. And if that means putting the beast on a starvation diet—no new tax revenue to batten on—so be it. Cold turkey time.

Anticipating gains in November, Republicans will not give Obama any new taxes before then. After November, their ranks swollen by Tea Party support, they will be even more intractable.

Where does that leave Obama—and us?

Later this year or early next, to avoid a debt crisis, Obama will ask Congress to raise taxes and pare back entitlement programs.

Republicans will fight the taxes to the last ditch. Democrats, having lost dozens of colleagues in the November massacre, will rebel against the cuts in social spending.

And a paralyzed government will drift closer toward the maelstrom.

The American World According to Buchanan. Where is He Wrong?

"America is in an existential crisis from which the nation may not survive."
Drudge

• The U.S. Army is breaking and is too small to meet America’s global commitments.

• The dollar has sunk to historic lows and is being abandoned by foreign governments.

• U.S. manufacturing is being hollowed out.

• The greatest invasion in history, from the Third World, is swamping the ethno-cultural core of the country, leading to Balkanization and the loss of the Southwest to Mexico.

• The culture is collapsing and the nation is being deconstructed along the lines of race and class.

• A fiscal crisis looms as the unfunded mandates of Social Security and Medicare remain unaddressed.

All these crises are hitting America at once -- a perfect storm of crises.
Specifically, Buchanan contends:

• Pax Americana, the era of U.S. global dominance, is over. A struggle for global hegemony has begun among the United States, China, a resurgent Russia and radical Islam

• Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a product of hubris and of ideology, a secular religion of “democratism,” to which Bush was converted in the days following 9/11

• Torn asunder by a culture war, America has now begun to break down along class, ethnic and racial lines.

• The greatest threat to U.S. sovereignty and independence is the scheme of a global elite to erase America’s borders and merge the USA, Mexico and Canada into a North American Union.

• Free trade is shipping jobs, factories and technology to China and plunging America into permanent dependency and unpayable debt. One of every six U.S. manufacturing jobs vanished under Bush

• “Sovereign Wealth Funds,” controlled by foreign regimes and stuffed with trillions of dollars from U.S. trade deficits, are buying up strategic corporate assets vital to America’s security

• As U.S. wages are stagnant, corporate CEOs are raking in rising pay and benefits 400 to 500 times that of their workers

• The Third World invasion through Mexico is a graver threat to our survival as one nation than anything happening in Afghanistan or Iraq

* European-Americans, 89% of the nation when JFK took the oath, are now 66% and sinking. Before 2050, America is a Third World nation

• By 2060, America will add 167 million people and 105 million immigrants will be here, triple the 37 million today.

• Hispanics will be over 100 million in 2050 and concentrated in a Southwest most Mexicans believe belongs to them

Buchanan’s Recommendations:

• A new foreign-defense policy that closes most of the 1000 bases overseas, reviews all alliances, and brings home U.S. troops

• A purge of neoconservative ideology and the “Cakewalk” crowd” from national power.

• To avert a second Cold War, the United States should “get out of Russia’s space and get out of Russia’s face,” and shut down all U.S. bases on the soil of the former Soviet Union

• To reach a cold peace in the culture war, Buchanan urges a return to federalism and the overthrow of our judicial dictatorship by Congressionally mandated restrictions on the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

• To end the trade deficits and save the dollar, Buchanan urges a Hamiltonian solution: a 20% Border Equity Tax on imports, with the $500 billion raised to be used to end taxation on American producers

• To prevent America becoming “a tangle of squabbling nationalities” Buchanan urges: No amnesty for the 12-20 million illegal aliens; a border fence from San Diego to Brownsville; Congressional declarations that children born to illegal aliens are not citizens and English is the language of the United States; and a “timeout” on all immigration.