Whatever the case, it's not wise to use sarcasm in a nationally syndicated column that gets sent out to local papers in Middle America.
Buchanan does make one unequivocally valid point -- that Obama is simply not willing or able to be as harsh and authoritarian as Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, and Truman were. But one shouldn't forget that Washington is increasingly identifying "right-wing radicals" as "national security threats" and "domestic terrorists." If Janet Napolitano decided to round up David Duke, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, me, and others listed as "dangerous" by the SPLC, would Pat then praise Washington for its "seriousness"?
Via email, a friend wrote me of how Buchanan -- along with others conservatives of his generation -- is caught between two incompatible versions of conservatism:
The column seems like a good example of what happens when one subscribes to two definitions of conservatism that are sometimes in conflict. In the Cold War, the extent to which one was willing to propose virtually totalitarian measures in the fight against Communism was an indication of one's right-wing bona fides. But conservatism in the America First context obviously can't encompass wars for global democratic human rights, or whatever the hell it is Americans are supposed to be dying for in the Islamic world. The competing standards of Cold War and America First conservatism can't be reconciled, but rather than abandon the Cold War criteria and risk seeming like a "liberal" by that standard, PJB affirms both standards and disregards the contradiction. So let's have global democratic wars and New Deal wars and all the rest, as long as the means by which they are prosecuted are sufficiently "conservative" by the standards of, say, National Review circa 1959.
