The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS • June passes and so has my displeasure with Pat Buchanan for trashing a third of the conservative movement and for giving encouragement to some rather unpleasant people. Now,...
...Carlson tedious and so importunate that he eventually attempted to murder him because he "didn't think he [Mr...
...His account of adolescent brawling has become the basis of psycho-babbling analysis by one Buchanan-basher after another, and Frum now joins the parade...
...In his police report, state trooper S. M. Lunsford attested that Dr...
...David Frum replies: It is simply bizarre to suggest—as Robert Novak seems to—that it is unfair to judge a writer by his writings...
...Carlson from taking his life, Mr...
...Why...
...What's more, the author, David Frum, concludes by calling for Buchanan's repudiation by all conservatives...
...Still, no environmentalist seems to have gotten the hint that the environment kills...
...Professionally, his self-discipline en-abled him to perform with strict restraint in two hitches as a White House aide and with unvarying fairness as a moderator on CNN's "Capital Gang...
...The records show that after being handcuffed she shouted, "You son of a [expletive...
...On June 21, President Bush criticized the Senate for approving a highway construction bill that the President adjudges too costly...
...Patrick Buchanan has put millions of words into print...
...Hines's bereaved wife drew a semi-automatic weapon and fired at several men, one of whom had innocently removed a photograph of the couple from the coffin and torn it to shreds...
...It is especially painful to read this calumniation in TAS, particularly in view of Bob Tyrrell's view that conservatives must band together and stop shooting their own wounded to avoid the "conservative crack-up...
...And a reputedly conservative Republican congressman has been found on stage at a Grateful Dead concert, where he protested his expulsion by that feculent group's security squad...
...That dispute between the second wife of Mr...
...It can safely be predicted, as J. Danforth Quayle can confirm, that anybody—conservative or not—who fires on TAS will get as much or better in return...
...The congressman is Rep...
...Mount Unzen erupted over Shimabara, Japan, and Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines for the first time since the fourteenth century...
...Buchanan is no anti-Semite, as anybody who knows him well will avow...
...Instead, Frum from the opening paragraph launches an ad hominem attack portraying Buchanan as an embarrassment to genteel conservatives, among whom he apparently lists himself...
...Snyder took him fishing and introduced him to new friends, but he found Mr...
...The family to which Mr...
...Does this vary from what the Wall Street Journal and The American Spectator espouse...
...Edith Cresson, bragged to an interviewer four years ago that Frenchmen were superior lovers (her sampling was demographically superb, though hygienically alarming) and that homosexuality is the sexual preference of 25 percent of British, German, and American men...
...But the very unacceptability of the offense mandates that any accusation must be founded in fact, not in surmise or fancy...
...you [expletive] can't do this to me...
...In my opinion, it is unlikely this attack would have been launched had not TAS been listed by Buchanan in a column as the recipient of financial aid from neoconservatives, which he assails...
...Richter "tried to kick me in the groin area...
...That would be acceptable were Frum not launching an assault on not merely the views but the character of a man he does not know...
...She eventually failed the test, but to Fairfax County General District Court Judge Robert J. Smith her PMS defense made perfect sense, and the learned judge found Dr...
...Regrettably, he did not bother to interview Buchanan or anybody who knows him well, but has relied exclusively on his written word...
...He closes by comparing Buchanan with Gerald L. K. Smith and the John Birchers...
...The depiction last month of Buchanan as a Hell's Angel motorcycling right winger, both in the cover portrait and the cover story ("The Conservative Bully Boy"), marks the first barrage in his attempted demolition that does not come from a writer or publication directly connected with either the left or the Israeli lobby...
...Earl Pruitt twice presented the wrong body to the wake of Mr...
...Frum brands Buchanan's opposition to intervention (which ended promptly once American troops were in combat) with the label of "isolationism...
...Abe Rosenthal's infamous New York Times column triggered the campaign suddenly defaming Buchanan as anti-Semitic...
...Robert D. Novak Washington, D.C...
...military intervention in the Persian Gulf and noted that emphatic backing for the use of American military force came from friends of Israel...
...It is particularly reprehensible that an article that starts by questioning Buchanan's criticism of neoconservative funding ends with a gratuitous accusation of "Jew-baiting...
...Not all American judges are mad-caps...
...N one of this would be worth comment were it not for Frum's startling conclusion: "How deeply into kookery can a man who claims to speak for conservatism go before other conservatives are obliged to repudiate him...
...She was condemned to death in 1981 for her role in the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after her brilliant court-mom defense, now cited by many American feminists as the precursor to the PMS (premenstrual syndrome) defense that has become the jewel of modern American jurisprudence...
...While on trial, Miss Jiang was given to violent outbursts, shrieks, howls, horselaughs, and even gurgles—particularly when her estimable husband was mentioned...
...Moldenhauer's ashes, giving an envelope to each party...
...RET SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE ROBERT NOVAK ON PAT BUCHANAN C urely, not The American Spectator...
...If he said bite someone, I bit him...
...Why it took the authorities so long to announce her death was not immediately clear, though she had been in frail health for a long time and was moving very slowly in the last months of her life...
...Upon being arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in Fairfax County, Virginia, last Thanksgiving, the estimable Dr...
...In the wake of Hitler's Holocaust, it is unpardonable and impermissible...
...Pruitt missent a second body to the Butler family has not been explained, but Mr...
...Professor Harker had warned that he was the target of faculty "workaholics," some of whom teach as many as two courses a week for entire semesters before taking sick leave...
...Not a bit...
...It might be argued that Buchanan began the exchange with anill-advised attack on the neocons, but his errant sniping has been answered with a nuclear counterattack...
...Nor does the body of his writing support the indictment...
...That raises the question of who is the heretic...
...This is a wicked caricature that bears no resemblance to the Pat Buchanan I have known for over twenty years as a news source, a colleague, and a friend...
...Frank Snyder, of the privately operated Suicide Prevention Center, and Mr...
...Richter "drop-kicked the Breathalyzer table...
...James Burt, has insisted that his surgery was meant to "enhance the sexual pleasure of patients" and that he never operated without their consent...
...Derlin Hines were greatly inconvenienced during the wake's "quiet hour" when Mr...
...Tom Butler...
...In Oakland, enlifornia's historic C. P. Bannon Mortuary, mourners at the wake for Mr...
...A final word on anti-Semitism...
...Thus, the only justification for David Frum's character assassination is to join the ongoing campaign to destroy Pat Buchanan as a conservative force in America...
...Hoping to dissuade Mr...
...Frum apparently does not understand the tenet of the conservative movement that the priority for U.S...
...How Mr...
...Yet there is good news, too...
...America's multi-million dollar mortuary industry is under fire...
...Pruitt's employees initially mis-sent his body for an open-coffin wake never did catch on, thinking their deceased loved one was supposed to look different...
...But the neocon dispute hardly justifies writing Buchanan out of the conservative movement...
...According to the New York nmes, Miss Phillips "showed no emotion" and "left the courtroom without speaking to reporters," who had important questions that now may never be asked...
...Frum is a member of the renowned editorial-page staff of the Wall Street Journal, whose virtues include a willingness to venture out of the office for shoe-leather reporting...
...That is a disservice not only to its target but to those who published it...
...if the essence of the man is to be found anywhere it is there, and not in his friends' polite comments about what an affable chap he is...
...The right—as well as the left—is split on trade and immigration, so Buchanan is by no means isolated in his views...
...Personally, he is a man of unfailing good manners and discretion who does not faintly resemble Frum's ruffian...
...It was passed 91 to 7. • A diverse team of scientists from the United States, France, and Britain has found a pre-human jawbone in the Otavia hills of northern Namibia...
...I was Chairman Mao's dog," the steatopygic ex-actress would say...
...Since nothing Frum has written justifies such an "obligation," he packs into his fmal paragraph the throwaway line that Buchanan's "real message is inseparable from his sly Jew-baiting...
...But merely to level this charge, however unsupported it is, is to inflict serious damage on him...
...Snyder is no longer employed by the center...
...I do not deign to tell Pat Buchanan what to write, but I believe he would be better off trashing liberals than sniping at William J. Bennett (who defended him when A. M. Rosenthal launched the smear campaign against him...
...Actually, Chairman Mao died of natural causes in 1976...
...Radioactive cat droppings have been found in trash being transported to the Berkeley, California, waste disposal site...
...In London, England, sensing that the times are not propitious for promoting good manners, members of The Polite Society have suspended operations...
...What's more, I agree with some points made early in Frum's article about the futility of the neocon funding debate...
...Yes, it is all too true...
...The Drug Enforcement Agency has seized the hallucinatory agronomist's land, and he and his family now languish in an Arizona hoosegow...
...They had gone to court to secure his ashes but in Florida's Dade County Circuit Court the solomonic Judge Robert Newman simply split Mr...
...In fact, Buchanan's position as a major conservative spokesman—perhaps even a presidential candidate—was undisputed until he opposed U.S...
...When the Breathalyzer test was presented, Dr...
...In Dayton, Ohio, a jury settled a dispute over the precise value of 45-year-old Miss Janet Phillips's vagina when it awarded the Centerville, Ohio, socialite $5 million in damages against a gynecologist who she has claimed reconstructed her prized possession without permission...
...In Sacramento, California, an unfortunate personality clash between Mr...
...Geraldine K. Richter, 42...
...for that matter, it could be Madonna's were it not for that gum cavity...
...John Kasich from Ohio, and he claims neither public intoxication nor faulty navigational equipment as an excuse...
...In Middle Island, Long Island, the proprietors of the Long Island Pet Cemetery face criminal charges for cremating some 250,000 pets since 1984 and indis6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 criminately returning their ashes, giving, for instance, the ashes of a dog to a cat owner or those of an angel fish to the owner of an opossum...
...He is the first tenured professor to be dismissed in the school's 92-year history, and he was immediately barred from the university golf course, sauna, whirlpool, and mental health facilities—all important learning centers on a progressive campus these days...
...There were no further fatalities...
...and now they have nailed him...
...Richter not guilty—a commendable result in the very month that Chinese feminists lost one of their brightest lights...
...The statement elicited widespread indignation in Britain but hardly any response at all in the United States, where many progressives considered it a compliment, or in Germany, where her estimate is probably low...
...Ben Carlson, a frequent caller to the center, has led to Mr...
...That indeed seems to be its purpose...
...His principal foundation for depicting Buchanan as a barroom tough is Right from the Beginning, Buchanan's charming and self-deprecatory memoir of a middle-class Catholic boyhood in Washington, D.C...
...Gerald Cedar, may no longer be made available to the editors of the Nation...
...He is the author of Surgery of Love, privately published...
...In an unhappy follow-up to last month's report on that hate campaign being waged against Western Illinois University's estimable Professor George R. Harker, WIU's Board of Governors met behind closed doors on June 20 and gave the distinguished professor, whose courses on the concepts and philosophy of leisure held so much promise for all varsity athletes and cheerleaders, the official heave-ho...
...On June 4, the second anniversary of Peking's suppression of China's pro-democracy movement, Chinese officials announced that Miss Jiang Qing (Chiang Ching), widow of the late and callipygian Chairman Mao Tse-tung, had committed suicide on May 14...
...This lively and valued voice of the right has joined the New York Times, the New Republic, and Commentary in the assault on Patrick J. Buchanan...
...I hope you [expletive] get shot and come into my hospital so I can refuse to treat you, or if any other trooper gets shot, I will also refuse to treat them...
...Pruitt's lawyer has opined cryptically: "So there's one error compounding another...
...Clearly there is not enough here to sustain a full-length article attacking Buchanan on the merits of his writings...
...Snyder's arrest...
...So much for that great metropolis's claim to being a nuclear-free zone...
...That attests to the feistiness of this publication and its editor-in-chief, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., whose refusal to suffer slurs silently is a quality I applaud...
...Now, let us get on with maintaining a movement, right, Pat...
...The scientists believe that the yellowed lower jaw, with gay teeth and a gum cavity for a tusk-like fang, could be the remains of an animal long thought to be the "missing link" between apes and humans, though the fossil does sound suspiciously like the jawbone of one of the estimable Madonna's early boyfriends...
...power, since we cannot serve as policeman for the world, has been to stop the spread of Communist poison...
...That "connoisseur-quality" marijuana grown on secret farms throughout the West, allegedly by members of the famed Hog Farm commune under the direction of the estimable Mr...
...I also share Frum's disagreement with Buchanan's nationalistic stands on trade and immigration, which are bad politics and bad policy...
...Novak's unwillingness to judge writers by their writing prevents him from (continued on page 35) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 7...
...Ideologically, Buchanan is no kook but an eloquent and effective spokesman for mainstream conservative causes, and he certainly meets Frum's test of "what should be done tomorrow morning...
...The two targets most vocally unhappy about Buchanan's neocon column—Tyrrell and Bill Bennett—are, like Buchanan, Roman Catholics (Tyrrell a fellow parishioner of Buchanan, Bennett a fellow alumnus of Washington's Gonzaga High School...
...I'm a doctor...
...In Houston, the mortuary of Mr...
...A British newspaper has reported that France's fast female prime minister, the estimable Mrs...
...Perhaps through coincidence, possibly through God's will, three days after the announcement of Miss Jiang's happy dispatch, the Washington Post reported the PMS defense brilliantly executed by Dr...
...The connection is ludicrous...
...He has been a stalwart in the long struggle against Communism and performed signal service in alerting the world to the follies and excesses of global financial institutions...
...Her former gynecologist, the estimable Dr...
...The pet cemetery's owners also face charges for dumping dead animals in four wooded areas near the cemetery, where they have become a health hazard for all save the gigantic rats that feed on them...
...Carlson] had the guts" to take his own life...
...He is firm for limited government, traditional cultural values, and a strong national defense...
...Richter went ballistic...
...He then indicts Buchanan for inconsistency, belittling his concern with Communist oppression in Nicaragua, Angola, and Lithuania...
...Peter Moldenhauer (deceased) and his two daughters from a previous marriage has been settled...
Vol. 24 • August 1991 • No. 8
