Enter Stage Gabbing

web posted September 20, 1999

Goodbye. Good riddance

As I write this, Pat Buchanan has not yet announced what everyone already knows, that he is leaving the Republican Party -- the one that nurtured his popularity and saw him serve a president or two -- for the Reform Party. His yet-to-be announced decision has caused all sorts of consternation within his party.

I say goodbye. And good riddance.

Buchanan does enjoy a decent level of support from conservatives as evidenced by Enter Stage Right's highly unscientific weekly polls which saw him perform reasonably well against the other candidates for the GOP nomination. That support has yet to be shown by grassroots Republicans who have seen fit to give him only about 6 to 10 per cent support in the polls. At least they are demonstrating an intelligence that the leadership of the Republican Party has yet to show.

There are several good reasons to cheer Buchanan's departure, the foremost is that he is simply a stain on his party. He has embarrassed Republicans and might have even cost them an election in 1996. Besides that, he's a racist. There, I said it. Pat Buchanan is a racist.

Although Buchananites would label that as a baseless smear against their man and conservatism in general, the evidence is there and it dates back decades to when he was serving with Richard Nixon and it's all in his own words.

Although he's never said it in plain simple language -- he is a politician after all -- it's clear he doesn't think too highly of minorities. Consider what he wrote on race relations in his biography, Right from the Beginning, back in 1988:

"There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."

When not in print, Buchanan loves to stick his foot in his mouth on television, as evidenced by this witticism from This Week with David Brinkley back in 1991:

"If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?"

I guess Zulus aren't capable of being citizens of the United States.

But if he doesn't like minorities, it's Jews that seem to hold a special spot in Buchanan's heart, as evidenced by his linking of Desert Storm to Jewish influences in government, his recent comments on the "money boys" from New York or "New York bankers" (code for Jews if I ever heard it), his attacks on Jewish political figures while Christians get a free pass, his praise of Adolph Hitler as a "individual of great courage" or his bizarre claim about the Holocaust.

As an example, in a March 17, 1990, syndicated column, Buchanan wrote that it was impossible for 850 000 Jews to be killed by diesel exhaust fed into the gas chamber at Treblinka. Why? "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody," he wrote. As proof, Buchanan wrote about a group of school children who emerged unharmed 45 minutes after being exposed to diesel fumes while trapped in a train tunnel.

Where did he get this information? Buchanan says someone sent it to him. Perhaps, but the source of this information is the German American Information and Education Association, a group devoted to debunking the Holocaust.

I could go into his description of Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory" or how he told a anti-Buchanan Jewish protester that "This rally is of Americans, for Americans and for the good ol' USA, my friend" or how even William F. Buckley found it impossible to defend his former protege against charges of anti-Semitism, but I didn't mean for this to be a laundry list of charges.

Rather, I wrote this so that Republicans could look at his departure as a positive step. He's managed to alienate a lot of Americans who will never forget his culture war speech -- whether he was right or wrong -- at the 1996 GOP nominating convention and he hasn't helped the party's efforts in attracting minorities to the fold.

As much as I distrust him as a clone of his father, George W. Bush and the Republican Party will benefit greatly by Buchanan's departure. Bush seems to be enjoying unusually strong support from blacks (40 per cent support according to some polls, up from the traditional 15 per cent seen over the past several decades) and women, two groups that have avoided the Republican Party. Those numbers can only rise with Buchanan gone.

Show how Republicans represent all of America and not just white country club members. The first step is to show how they aren't like Patrick Buchanan and his friendly face of hate.

Thanks for reading,

Steven Martinovich


Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

web posted August 30, 1999

ESR writers spotlighted by WND

Once again ESR writers had their material spolighted by WorldNetDaily.

On August 25, Steve Farrell's The Un-American United Nations was among WND's top stories for the day, garnering him and ESR a lot of traffic, in fact, a record level.

The next day on August 26, Steve Martinovich's Different party, different standards was made a WND Column du Jour, bringing yet another avalanche of traffic.

Thanks to WND for making ESR that much better!

Win an ESR Conservative Site of the Day Award? Get targetted by the Michigan state legislature!

I recently received this email that I thought you would be interested in. It's from a winner of ESR's Conservative Site of the Day Award earlier this year.

"I keep forgetting to pass along a story which happened in late April and which you're almost certain to find of interest. I was in Lansing, Michigan, to testify before the lower house of the Republican-run state legislature about how best to curb frivolous lawsuits. The ranking Democrat on the Judiciary panel, Rep. Laura Baird, who represents the district around MSU in East Lansing, is herself a former lawyer and a strong liberal feminist who sides consistently with trial lawyer interests. When her turn came to question me, she fixed a basilisk stare on me and proceeded to launch into some of the nastiest cross-examination I've run into in a long while, stating more or less flatly that I had no qualifications to discuss the state of the litigation system, that I was an ideological extremist yet simultaneously in the pocket of big business, etc., etc. (It was clear the questions had been handed her by staff, probably originating with trial lawyer lobbyists, as became more evident after my answers when she seemed at a loss how to follow up.)

Anyway, her sources had visited my website and she then demanded to know whether I was or was not the author of the Walter Olson home page, which seemed very lawyerly of her since putting up a home site would seem like an awful lot of trouble if one were then trying to conceal the fact that one was its subject. Finally, she came to the crowning question, intended to show what a dangerous extremist I was: was it or was it not true, she triumphantly demanded to know, that my site had won the "Conservative Site of the Day" award? Throwing modesty to the winds, I said I was hardly going to deny winning an award.

So there you have it: winning the CSoD exposes you to investigation by the Michigan state legislature. Personally I think she was barking up the wrong tree, since neither the Republican majority nor the administration of Gov. Engler, who between them will decide whether to pass new controls on litigation abuse, are likely to run in horror at seeing someone labeled "conservative"."

That spotlights the danger of being chosen as a Site of the Day by ESR...do you have a web site and the guts to face what Walter did? Find out and apply!

ESR wants you!

The rate of expansion here is frankly overwhelming and its soon time to begin expanding the staff around here. Interested in getting on our masthead? Want to volunteer writing, editing, whatever? Write us!

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