By Patrick J. Buchanan
With reports circulating of its imminent demise, The New York Times announced in January that it had found a white knight.Sort of. For the knight in question, who already owns 6 percent of the sinking Times and was investing $250 million in notes carrying 14 percent interest, was Carlos Slim. Reputedly the richest man in the world, taking the title from Bill Gates in 2007, Carlos is not so highly regarded in his own country.
In Mexico, according to Forbes, "the media and the masses long have held a sneaking suspicion that there is something shady about Slim. He is described as a rapacious monopolist who built his empire on cozy ties to Mexican presidents ... ."
For this column, however, the issue is not how Carlos bought up the Mexican telephone monopoly, but whether this Big Enchilada has bought up Andrew Rosenthal's editorial page.
For, two weeks after Carlos' bailout cash arrived, Rosenthal's page launched a hysterical attack on the patriots' movement that seeks to halt the invasion of the United States from Mexico.
Targets: my sister Bay; our American Cause foundation and its executive director, Marcus Epstein; Peter Brimelow, the author of a seminal work on U.S. immigration, Alien Nation; Jim Pinkerton of Fox News, a White House aide to Bush I; Fox's Bill O'Reilly; and this writer.
In the Times' editorial, The Nativists Are Restless, Brimelow is said to run an "extremist Website" (VDARE.com) where he and I post "musings about racial dilution and the perils facing white people." Pinkerton was behind the "racist Willie Horton ads." Epstein holds "white-supremacist" views. And we all are into "racialist extremism" and "Latino-bashing," which calls to mind "the days of the Know-Nothings and the Klan."
Racism "is all around us," wails the Times. And the nation has a "perpetual need for vigilance," even in this new "age of Obama."
What occasioned this wilding attack? A news conference at the National Press Club, where the Times reporter failed to show, and release of a dry report by Epstein [PDF]that contends that GOP defeats in 2008 had nothing to do with the strong stand most Republicans took for border security.
The Times calls the report "nonsense." But the case is open and shut. Of 26 House Republicans who lost, Epstein found only one who was a strong border-control candidate defeated by a pro-amnesty Democrat. In every other GOP defeat, either the Democrat was tough on amnesty and border security or the Republican was wimpish.
That John McCain, who led the effort to put illegal aliens on a path to citizenship, got less than a third of the Hispanic vote shows that being pro-amnesty does not necessarily win the Hispanic vote. And the 70 percent of New Yorkers who rejected Eliot Spitzer's proposal to give driver's licenses to illegals, forcing Hillary Clinton to abandon her own governor, should tell even the obtuse Times which way the wind is blowing.
But rather than argue with us, the Times chose to slime us as racists and white supremacists. This is of a piece with the Times' sliming of the Californian electorate that voted against state recognition of homosexual marriage. To the Times, that 52-48 vote meant "right-wing forces, led by the Mormon Church," had "enshrined bigotry in the state's Constitution."
Both diatribes reveal much about the fall of a great newspaper and the degeneration of a political philosophy that was once hegemonic in America. Liberalism has hardened into an ideology, a rabid religion that anathematizes any and all heretics.
To the Times' editorial writers, dissent from orthodoxy on illegal aliens or gay rights can only be explained by bigotry, hatred, racism or xenophobia in the hearts of the dissidents. To oppose the Times' agenda on social or moral issues is ascribed to mental illness or moral sickness.
Yet, as these negative views on homosexual marriage and illegal immigration remain mainstream views, the Times comes off, as it did in Sunday's sophomoric editorial, as loathing Middle America.
In its own mind, the Times is battling heroically the forces of hatred. Can it not, by rereading its own words, see the hatred in its own heart?
As Christ Himself said, Andrew, "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
Let it be said. There is nothing wrong about Americans fighting to preserve the culture and country they grew up in. That is what patriotic conservatism is all about. And if the Times can understand and support the right of native tribes like the Navajo and Apache to preserve their unique character and culture, why this viral hatred of those of us who wish to preserve the Western and Christian character of America?
Why does the Times want to see our America destroyed? From what poisoned well comes this hatred of the America we love?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play.
Should the president declare he has gone the last mile for a negotiated end to Iran's nuclear program and impose the "crippling" sanctions he promised in 2008, America would be on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war.
And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate.
Harry Reid is surely aware a U.S. clash with Iran, with him at the president's side, could assure his re-election. Last week, Reid whistled through the Senate, by voice vote, a bill to put us on that escalator.
Senate bill 2799 would punish any company exporting gasoline to Iran. Though swimming in oil, Iran has a limited refining capacity and must import 40 percent of the gas to operate its cars and trucks and heat its homes.
And cutting off a country's oil or gas is a proven path to war.
In 1941, the United States froze Japan's assets, denying her the funds to pay for the U.S. oil on which she relied, forcing Tokyo either to retreat from her empire or seize the only oil in reach, in the Dutch East Indies.
The only force able to interfere with a Japanese drive into the East Indies? The U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1967 threatened to close the Straits of Tiran between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba to ships going to the Israeli port of Elath. That would have cut off 95 percent of Israel's oil.
Israel response: a pre-emptive war that destroyed Egypt's air force and put Israeli troops at Sharm el-Sheikh on the Straits of Tiran.
Were Reid and colleagues seeking to strengthen Obama's negotiating hand?
The opposite is true. The Senate is trying to force Obama's hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war -- a war to deny Iran weapons that the U.S. Intelligence community said in December 2007 Iran gave up trying to acquire in 2003.
Sound familiar?
Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made clear the Senate is seizing control of the Iran portfolio. "If the Obama administration will not take action against this regime, then Congress must."
U.S. interests would seem to dictate supporting those elements in Iran who wish to be rid of the regime and re-engage the West. But if that is our goal, the Senate bill, and a House version that passed 412 to 12, seem almost diabolically perverse.
For a cutoff in gas would hammer Iran's middle class. The Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia on their motorbikes would get all they need. Thus the leaders of the Green Movement who have stood up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah oppose sanctions that inflict suffering on their own people.
Cutting off gas to Iran would cause many deaths. And the families of the sick, the old, the weak, the women and the children who die are unlikely to feel gratitude toward those who killed them.
And despite the hysteria about Iran's imminent testing of a bomb, the U.S. intelligence community still has not changed its finding that Tehran is not seeking a bomb.
The low-enriched uranium at Natanz, enough for one test, has neither been moved nor enriched to weapons grade. Ahmadinejad this week offered to take the West's deal and trade it for fuel for its reactor. Iran's known nuclear facilities are under U.N. watch. The number of centrifuges operating at Natanz has fallen below 4,000. There is speculation they are breaking down or have been sabotaged.
And if Iran is hell-bent on a bomb, why has Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair not revised the 2007 finding and given us the hard evidence?
U.S. anti-missile ships are moving into the Gulf. Anti-missile batteries are being deployed on the Arab shore. Yet, Gen. David Petraeus warned yesterday that a strike on Iran could stir nationalist sentiment behind the regime.
Nevertheless, the war drums have again begun to beat.
Richard Pipes in a National Review Online piece featured by the Jerusalem Post -- "How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran" -- urges Obama to make a "dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue" by ordering the U.S. military to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Citing six polls, Pipes says Americans support an attack today and will "presumably rally around the flag" when the bombs fall.
Will Obama cynically yield to temptation, play the war card and make "conservatives swoon," in Pipes' phrase, to save himself and his party? We shall see.
Bay's latest column in Human Events
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