Buchanan Asks If GOP Is a Regional Party

Patrick J. Buchanan posits the end of the ideologically narrow and national GOP.

As President Barack Obama delivers his inaugural address to a nation filled with anticipation and hope, the vital signs of the loyal opposition appear worse than worrisome.

Patrick J. Buchanan Looks with Alarm at Declining 'White' Population

I like reading Patrick J. Buchanan. He's a great stylist, and unlike so many on the right, he's earnest and anti-interventionist in foreign policy.

On matters of race, though, Buchanan is whack.

In his latest column, The Way Our World Ends, Buchanan bemoans the future in which whites will compose an ever-decreasing proportion of the world's population, an alarming trend in Buchanan's view.

Writes Buchanan:

In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world's population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.

More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in
relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth -- a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany -- will vanish by 2060.

The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.

And thinking locally, Buchanan notes:

And America? According to the Pew Research Center, the Hispanic population of the United States will triple to 127 million by 2050, as Mexico's population grows to 130 million. An erasure of the U.S. border, or merger of the two countries, or the linguistic, cultural and social annexation of the American Southwest by Mexico appears fated.

Facts elude the distraught Buchanan, fearfully betraying his status as a good Irishman.

Much of the American Southwest was stolen from Mexico in an American war of aggression in the mid-19th century.

Race is a sick illusion; it has no biological or anthropological meaning, other than that of a social-psychological pathology used prominently and tragically in American history, continuing today.

Buchanan does offer a nod to past Western genocide and aggression, noting:

Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.

Buchanan would do better to note that constructs of race and dehumanization of those thought less than human are irrational and ludicrous.

We have nothing to fear from those with darker skin color, Mr. Buchanan, and your fear is unfounded.

"Don't worry, be happy," as Bobby McFerrin put it. And I think McFerrin may even be a black dude.

Buchanan: Petraeus Points to War With Iran

The fear and/or prediction of many that Bush, Cheney, McCain/Lieberman and company just may be stupid enough to launch an air strike against Iran this year has long been shared by isolationist, conservative columnist, Patrick J. Buchanan.

Because candidate McCain is so unschooled in foreign policy, McCain has repeatedly "confused the basic Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide that's absolutely fundamental to grasping the Middle East ... ," he fits in well with the neocon, imperialist foreign policy school.

Buchanan, citing Petraeus' testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee this week and other development, writes in his Petraeus Points to War With Iran:

The neocons may yet get their war on Iran. ... This is Bush's last chance to strike and, when Iran responds, to effect its nuclear castration. Are Bush and Cheney likely to pass up this last chance to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities and effect the election of John McCain? For any attack on Iran's 'terrorist bases' would rally the GOP and drive a wedge between Obama and Hillary. ...

Buchanan notes that the congressional Democrats have acted with the moral courage that is on a par of that displayed by the many authoritarian Arab countries that Vice President Cheney has been touring lately in the region.

In early 2007, Nancy Pelosi pulled down a resolution that would have denied Bush the authority to attack Iran without congressional approval. In September, both Houses passed the Kyl-Lieberman resolution designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.

Courtesy of Congress, Bush thus has a blank check for war on Iran. And the signs are growing that he intends to fill it in and cash it.

This is going to be one fascinating fall election; less fascinating, though, if you happen to be a human being living in Iran.