Pat Buchanan: the Kremlin's New Whore

When in doubt Pat Buchanan likes to drag out his time in the Reagan Administration to bolster his credibility. If we're to believe him, if Reagan were alive today, he'd be the same Ex-Republican apologist for tyranny and terrorism that Buchanan is today. But it only takes a quick glimpse at Buchanan's resume as the apologist for the ex-KGB oligarchy of Vladimir Putin to make the idea that Reagan and the Buchanan of today have anything in common, laughable.

Pat Buchanan's role as the far right's chief apologist for Putin didn't begin when he supported Russia's invasion of Georgia. He has a long history of apologizing and defending Putin and Russia. From Cold Warrior, Buchanan has made the long journey to becoming the sort of despicable creature who parrots Russian propaganda, champions the right of an ex-KGB thug to carve up Eastern Europe and the Baltic states and blame America for the whole thing.

In short Buchanan has become the complete antithesis of everything Reagan and his campaign against the USSR stood for.

When Georgia arrested a number of Russian spies, Buchanan, who likes to lay claim to the mantle of a cold warrior, instead warned;

Bush bought into the notion that U.S. vital interests required supporting ex-Russian republics against Moscow, which was absurd. Our vital interest was always in maintaining strong U.S.-Russian ties, which have been ravaged by the meddling of neoconservatives mired in Russophobia.

Somehow in the perverse rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, supporting democracy in the former Soviet Union had become Russophobic, making Ronald Reagan, Russophobe in Chief. In Buchanan's new world order, "Tear Down This Wall, Mr. President" had become Russophobia, and "Would you like to park the tanks there, Vladimir" was now the only reasonable foreign policy.

The hypocrisy of Buchanan, who repeatedly brings up Stalin's takeover of Eastern Europe as proof that WW2 failed, is championing Russia's right to do it all over again, is truly astounding, but typical of anti-war hypocrisy.

Buchanan then descended to Pravda levels of propaganda by parroting the Kremlin line about Georgia being Stalin's birthplace.

In late September, Saakashvili went a bridge too far, arresting four Russian officials as spies. President Vladimir Putin denounced the arrests as an "act of state terrorism with hostage-taking," calling them "a sign of the political legacy of Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria." Beria, who headed the NKVD secret police under Josef Stalin, had come out of Georgia, as did Stalin.

Of course Austria was Hitler's birth place, but we can only hope that if Russian tanks return to Austria, Pat Buchanan won't argue that Austria is at fault and is just like Nazi Germany. Or perhaps he will.

But lest anyone claim that Buchanan is simply being practical, when Litvinenko was murdered in London, Buchanan wrote "Is Putin Being Set Up?"

Whoever poisoned Alexander Litvinenko had two goals: a long and lingering death for the KGB defector and pointing a finger of accusation for his killing right in the face of Vladimir Putin.
Which leads me to believe Putin had nothing to do with it.

Yes clearly. After all the obviousness of a suspect removes all blame for him. It worked for OJ Simpson and it can work for Putin too. Buchanan's "logic" ignores the fact that the KGB routinely murdered enemies in ways meant to inspire fear. And of course such killings always had their Western apologists who would claim that the KGB could have had nothing to do with it.

Having transformed from Cold Warrior to Putin Apologist, Buchanan naturally begins to explore, who could have framed that nice Mr. Putin. Following the Kremlin line, Buchanan tries to pin it on mostly unnamed robber barons and finally on Litvinenko himself. He plants the convenient seeds of doubt before warning us,

As the predictable effect of Litvinenko's death has been to put a cloud of suspicion over Putin and a chill over Russian relations with the West, one must ask: To whose benefit is the discrediting of Putin? Who would seek a renewal of the Cold War? ...

America has a vital interest in this Scotland Yard investigation. What it discovers may tell us more about the character of the man into whose eyes George Bush claimed to have stared, and seen his soul, or it may tell us who the real enemies of this country are, who are out to restart the Cold War, and perhaps another hot one.

It's ironic to note that Buchanan here is talking like a cross between a Pravda editorial and the sort of anti-war liberals he used to despise. And it marked the fact that Buchanan had become what he had once most hated, a Soviet apologist. The sort of man who would offer wild excuses on behalf of Russian tyrants and smear those who would oppose them. The sort of man who would support Russia's right to carve up Eastern Europe while screaming at America for daring to intervene.

And indeed in article after article, Buchanan went on a tear constantly castigating America for being mean to Vladimir Putin and provoking him.

Like a certain YouTube character defending Britney Spears, in 2006 Pat Buchanan shrieked Get Out of Putin’s Face

“The greatest geostrategic disaster of the 20th century,” Vladimir Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Empire. His statement shook Western elites, for we see that collapse as miraculous deliverance, the welcome death of an evil empire built on the denial of God-given rights, an empire with the blood of scores of millions of innocents on its hands.

But if we wish to befriend Russia—and America has no more vital interest —we must try to see the world as Putin sees it.

With those words Buchanan handily repudiated the legacy of Anti-Communism, instead urging us to see things from the point of view of a KGB tyrant, and to see Reagan's greatest triumph, the collapse of the USSR, instead as a tragedy.

Buchanan has clearly taken his own advice and penned article after article from Putin's point of view.

In May 9th 2006, Buchanan demanded to know Why Are We Baiting Putin?

No legitimate interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail, either by supply management or attempt to monopolize transportation," thundered Vice President Cheney to the international pro-democracy conference in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Cheney's remarks were directed straight at the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin, who is to host the G-8 Conference in July.
What does McCain think we would accomplish – other than a new parading of our moral superiority – by so public an insult to Putin and Russia as a Bush boycott of the St. Petersburg summit? Do we not have enough trouble in this world, do we not have enough people hating us and Bush that we have to get into Putin's face and antagonize the largest nation on earth and a co-equal nuclear power? What is the purpose of this confrontation diplomacy? What does it accomplish?

Of course in the Reagan era and even before, it was understood that standing up to Russia on behalf of the Baltic states was itself a good thing. Today Buchanan like the liberals he pretends to mock, whines demanding to know what purpose upsetting Russia can possible serve?

By July 15th 2006, Buchanan had progressed to outright gushing over Putin himself

Putin, a black belt in karate and the man into whose soul Bush famously saw five years ago, as he gazed into the eyes of that ex-KGB officer, takes no guff from these Americans.

That is among the reasons Putin's approval rating in Russia is twice that of Bush in America and four times that of the veep. On the Eastern shore of Delaware, where college girls from Eastern Europe come to work in the summer, Putin is a rock star among the Russians.

And clearly a rock star to the giddy KGB lovin' schoolgirl that Pat Buchanan has become. The horrid image of Buchanan with a Putin poster in his Karate pj's can't help but emerge.

Buchanan admires the way that the karate wielding KGB officer "takes no guff from these Americans" forgetting that Buchanan is supposed to be one of those Americans himself.

But as anyone reading Buchanan's love affair with Putin can't help but miss, Buchanan isn't on America's side. Whether it's the photos of Putin in a karate uniform, helpful donations from across the curtain to Buchanan's magazine or campaign, or simply because Putin is everything that Pat Buchanan wishes he was-- he is solidly on Russia's side. Against America.

If anyone doubts whose side Buchanan is on, he presents a long list of Russian grievances against America, such as our support for democracy in the former Soviet Union and then states,

Putin has now responded in kind, and who can blame him?

Certainly not Pat Buchanan.

In his surreal attempt to still hang on to some scrap of Anti-Communist credibility, Buchanan attempts to position America as the new Communists and ex-KGB thug Putin, as the Anti-Communist courageously resisting us in Putin vs. the Neo-Comintern

One organization captured by the Neo-Comintern is Freedom House. Founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie in 1941 as a voice for global democracy and human rights, Freedom House, on the eve of the Iraq war, chose as its new chairman ex-CIA Director James Woolsey. By his first anniversary in office, Woolsey had declared Vladimir Putin's Russia "un-free" and was beating the drums for "World War IV" against "Islamofascism."

Though a radical leftist populist, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez was democratically elected. He charges that NED had a hand in the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew his government and in the recall election forced upon him in 2004. Foreign journalists contend that the color-coded popular "revolutions" that ousted Milosevic in Serbia, Shevardnadze in Georgia, and the Kuchma crowd in Ukraine were also made in the USA and hand-tooled at Langley.

Not only does Buchanan sound like the rabid Soviet apologists that he once despised, ranting about Langley and accusing America of "beating the drums for war", now suddenly promoting democracy and opposing Communist and Socialist tyrants, the very same sort of people that the Reagan administration worked to keep out of power in places like Nicaragua, are now our "victims" and the people opposed to them are the Neo-Comintern.

This warped attempt to turn right and wrong on its head is a pathetic attempt by Buchanan to justify his defenses of Putin, an actual Communist, by smearing American opponents of Putin as Communists.

And just when you might think that Pat Buchanan can't possibly sink any lower, in May 2007 he penned a column, Dying for Estonia arguing that we should throw Estonia under the bus along with Georgia, Lativa, Ukraine and apparently any other Eastern European country, including Poland and Czechoslovakia.

If President Putin decides the Estonians need a lesson, and sends troops to teach it, the United States, under NATO, would have to treat Russian intervention in Estonia as an attack upon the United States, and declare war on behalf of Estonia.

So we come face to face with the idiocy of having moved NATO onto Russia's front porch, and having given war guarantees to three little nations with historic animosities toward a nuclear power that has the ability to inflict 1,000 times the destruction upon us as Iran.

Nor are these the only quarrels we have with Putin's Russia that could explode into full-blown crises. Washington has persuaded the Czech Republic and Poland, two former Warsaw Pact countries, to accept radars and missiles for a U.S. anti-missile system.

Having just consigned all of Eastern Europe into Russian hands, the same Eastern Europe that Buchanan has made a career of condemning FDR and Churchill for surrendering to Russia in the first place. Yet today Pat Buchanan is the biggest champion of that policy.

Somewhere Reagan is wishing he could get out of his grave so he could kick Buchanan's ass from here to Gdansk.

By the end of October 2007 Buchanan had indicted us for "restarting the Cold War". The bottom line is that on Pat's Planet, America is wrong and Putin is right. And Buchanan is solidly on Russia's side. Against America. Against the Baltic nations on whose supposed behalf he's been ranting for years. Buchanan doesn't simply exemplify the fifth column, he exemplifies moral cowardice and the craven need to worship tyranny so typical of the anti-war movement he has become a part of.

Pat Buchanan celebrates Putin. a member of the KGB, a tyrant who has restored much of Russia's Soviet era past and is now embarking on a campaign of conquest against the former Soviet Republics.

And Buchanan supports it all having become the Kremlin's new whore.