Special Correspondence/The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Responses to Frum's Buchanan
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY RESPONSES TO FRUM'S BUCHANAN David Frum's piece trashing Pat Buchanan ("The Conservative Bully Boy," TAS, July 1991) smells more like the...
...He's against taxes, but for tariffs...
...Is the influx of from one to three million illegal immigrants a year, most of whom have no intention of assimilating or being assimilated by U.S...
...What TAS published is not an article, but the tantrum of a man-brat for which he should be sent to his room without brie...
...The only inference that can be drawn from Buchanan's failure to criticize Heritage is like that old Henny Youngman joke: up to now everything's been OK...
...Allow me to comment briefly on another reference that pertains to me directly...
...I don't quite know how to reply to Prof...
...Paul Gottfried Professor of Humanities Elizabethtown College Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania David Frum makes light of what happened to Dr...
...Scrawled, misspelled letters that joke about the "Holohoax...
...After criticizing Mr...
...Can you give readers some help in recognizing couth...
...Frum apparently prefers to be vitriolic rather than analytical here to distract the reader from the real issues at stake in the current neoconservative/ paleoconservative debate...
...Frum makes a good argument that Buchanan is inconsistent in his stance on military intervention, but this inconsistency (if such it is) runs no deeper than William E Buckley's pro-national service view...
...I thought of the Dunciad in reading the July TAS and considered Pope Mr...
...And, as one of the nation's most prominent conservatives, he's tainting all the rest of us with his reckless actions and accusations...
...William R. Hawkins President, Hamilton Center for National Strategy Knoxville, TennesseeShabby-ville is a place that every editorin-chief has seen...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 23 Mr...
...He evidently doubts that we can transform a waterbuffalo into an American and he has serious doubts about the guilt of the poor Ukrainian who has been lynched by the "Chosen...
...Tom Blair San Pedra California It's not too difficult to figure the source of the mounting campaigns against Joe Sobran, Buchanan, and lately Sununu...
...Walter Eich Palo Alta California David Frum replies...
...They write back a little more eagerly...
...Harvey A. Taylor Fnst Nicolaus, California The vicious attack to which Buchanan is now being subjected by publications like yours is for one and only one reason, because Abe Rosenthal (the Al Sharpton of the American Jewish community) has decided that Mr...
...Shame on The American Spectator...
...Quick, a scented handkerchief for Mr...
...What I find instead is the accusation that anyone who does not lock-step with the neoconservatives on these issues is in "kook-land...
...In his giddy plan, we would finally achieve our "manifest destiny" by controlling almost all of North America...
...Have the neoconservatives now become the final arbiters of the defining principles of genuine conservatism...
...Maybe he figures that going toe to toe with the editor of Commentary and his friends is enough of a job for one man in one day...
...Not a nice fan club...
...Frank Ruddy Chevy Chase, Maryland Three cheers for David Frum...
...I read things like "Why Danny Can't Read" in TAS, and P. J. O'Rourke describing the bug-like procreation of Third Wonders and Martin Luther King "Bidenizing" his doctoral thesis...
...The rather curious allegations made by Muller to at least one University official reviewing Gottfried's appointment are well known...
...Instances abound, so let's just pluck one from Frum's opening paragraph, where he accuses Buchanan of "defending a Nazi war criminal" (read: anti-Semitism...
...A split between Big Government and Small Government conservatives is emerging...
...Frum should check his facts...
...And if an "America First" policy in WWII granted Nazism from Madrid to Moscow, would that have been worse than the actual result, Communism from East Germany to the Pacific...
...Pat Buchanan's appointment as the chatterbox on the right on Ted Turner's CNN "Crossfire" has made him the most conspicuous conservative in America...
...It's getting futile by now, but I do want to repeat that the focus of my article was not Buchanan's attitudes towards Jews and Israel...
...Frank MacGeehan Philadelphia, Pennsylvania If you don't get Pat Buchanan's permission to name him as a rape victim, you are no better than the New York Times (see Terry Eastland's Presswatch column "Against Her Will" in the July 1991 TAS...
...Daniel Herchenroether Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Given that Pat Buchanan has been thumping the neoconservatives severely lately in his columns, accusing them of being New Deal liberals who merely opportunistically posture as conservatives, I am not surprised by David Frum's biting polemical response...
...Chuck Fowler Bellemont, Arizona Bull's Eye on Buchanan...
...In one of his newsletters from last summer, Pat mapped out how the U.S...
...Yes, Mr...
...David Frum says that Pat Buchanan is a bully because he would rather pick on Norman Podhoretz than the Wall Street Journal or the Heritage Foundation...
...It's a curious thing...
...The conservative movement has always had its share of disputes, even when it was much smaller than it is today...
...Perhaps the "unfortunate" people of Lithuania don't fit his standards of "couthness...
...My intuition that Podhoretz was in on the hit was initially just that, an intuition, though one based on Muller's close connections with CoMmentary, in which he often publishes politically correct articles...
...Pat has become just plain scary...
...Does Frum also become unwell and get the vapors at the prospect of that brute, Buchanan...
...Apparently this has gone to his head...
...He opposes the Gulf War but wants a superpower confrontation over the Baltics...
...This tack is just plain lousy writing...
...Buchanan (like other Bible readers) knows that homosexual behavior is a vice to be denounced rather than conduct to be celebrated, or even tolerated...
...When are the David Frums and Abe Rosenthals of this great country going to realize that the country of Israel is not a part of the USA and each country's political policies.sometimes differ...
...he doesn't express concern, he "frets...
...The same month that an essay of mine highly critical of the isolationism of Buchanan, some of the Rockford crowd, and other anti-war conservatives appeared in the neoconservative journal the National Interest, I also had an article in the Rockford Institute's Chronicles critical of increased Third World immigration, a paleocon concern...
...Who is this crank...
...I don't know, exactly...
...Let me get this straight...
...Layne Littlepage New York, New York Though I agree with David Frum as against Pat Buchanan on most of the issues Frum addressed in his July essay, I am still concerned by his harsh tone...
...Wooding, the charge of "denying the Holocaust" does indeed apply to someone who refuses to believe that Germans killed Jews in gas chambers...
...It can be destructive, however, if it leads to blood feuds between exclusive schools of thought that claim infallibility...
...And for Frum to suggest that Podhoretz is anything but one of the most influential and powerful (neo)conservatives is disingenuous to say the least...
...Were these couth or has TAS become a conservative Mon-sieur Jourdain...
...that is alive intellectually rather than dead...
...And maybe Buchanan is just, as Frum thinks, a sly Jew-baiter who enjoys his work...
...But since others can address these weightier issues, I shall limit myself to the part of Frum's polemic dealing with my person...
...would (and should, in Pat's view) absorb the soon to be fragmented provinces of Canada, due to the failure of the Meech Lake Accords...
...Richard Weiss Annapolis, Maryland Buchanan must be a racist because he thinks it is hypocritical to be deemed a racist if one has difficulty imputing greatness to Martin Luther King, notwithstanding King's flirtation with Communism and his aberrant sexual conduct...
...Verner Trees, Jr...
...But it's both prudent and decent for conservatives to make clear that it is in fact conviction, and not hate, that motivates them...
...Maybe Buchanan simply finds Podhoretz to be more disagreeable than the latter outfits...
...Eich, it wasn't the Elders of Zion who commissioned my article...
...No doubt Demjanjuk's actual guilt or innocence matters as little to Frum as does Buchanan's true attitude toward Jews, many of whom admire Pat...
...Later on, however, in a published interview with Robert Moynihan of Thirty Days, Podhoretz responded to a question about my fate at Catholic University with the revealing statement that "his writings seem more Christian than Jewish...
...statements Pat Buchanan made in some of his columns...
...Prof of Political Science Elizabethtown College Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania Mr...
...Of course, what Buchanan really did was to question—as did "60 Minutes"—whether John Demjanjuk really was a Nazi war criminal, i.e., the death-camp sadist remembered as "Ivan the Terrible...
...An early effort to create opposition to him involved Jerry Z. Muller from CUA's Department of History...
...Stephen R. Maloney North Springfield Vermont [Pat Buchanan] is not a lapdog for that loony bin on the eastern end of the Mediterranean...
...He is certainly correct that Pat Buchanan is an embarrassment to many of us who feel we are fine conservatives politically, but don't share his dislike for Israel and Jews, his idea that only Communism is a menace to freedom, and his nerdy attitudes toward non-whites...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991...
...Mr...
...Is Buchanan wrong to worry about jobs for the unskilled crossing into Mexico and, if so, why...
...Worse yet, what's a weirdo like this doing in a decent magazine...
...Frum talks of "neoconservatives" and "the Rockford crowd" and while there is certainly hostility between some individuals associated with these two sub-groups, there's also a much larger number of us who recognize common themes and can work with both without agreeing entirely with either...
...Mike Tyson went on television recently to call Razor Ruddock a transvestite who secretly longs for-him...
...An even more bewildering argument is Frum's accusation that Buchanan is a coward for failing to take on that dreadnaught of neoconservative right think, the Heritage Foundation, while pummeling individual neocons like "poor old Norman Podhoretz...
...It's really a shame that The A merican Spectator has found it profitable to print David Frum's unworthy little stink-bomb...
...Anyone who does not believe the Holohoax swindle has to be a pretty good boy in my book...
...He is now infallible on politics and religion, and leading a virtual one-man campaign to restore the Latin Mass to the Catholic Church...
...From copious reports there were Marxists and neocons involved in the project, who engaged in such massive overkill that I have now been able to gather damning evidence about the incident...
...And still he is a target for Frum's piece in the July TAS...
...Claes G. Ryn Professor of Politics The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C...
...The Frum article may provoke a response from Buchanan, but I doubt it...
...Niceguy compared to David Frum in his treatment of Pat Buchanan...
...Does any Catholic know another who wants to return to the Latin Mass...
...I had associated the ability to delve into another's secret thoughts with Latin American fiction writers like Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez...
...But how else can we characterize Sherman's march to the sea, with its bombardment of women and children, its destruction of life and livelihood, and its culmination in a cruel and authoritarian Reconstruction...
...As a historian of American conservatism, moreover, I am appalled by his grotesque caricature of American conservative thinking, whether Taft Republican, Southern Agrarian, or aristocratic individualist, before the movement's forced reconstruction by his friends...
...Yet Buckley isn't called a kook or otherwise trashed in the Spectator...
...The article missed citing, however, a very telling example of Buchanan's inconsistency in his isolationist views...
...Unfortunately, as this correspondence shows, Patrick Buchanan has been finding a constituency among the movement's haters...
...even better would be "dishonest...
...Steve Roberts Northridge, California . . . I find TAS's Buchanan article strikingly similar in form, content, and spirit to a recent essay in Esquire attacking P. J. O'Rourke...
...If the best evidence Frum can come up with, in a life as public as Buchanan's, is a 21-year-old self-serving triple-hearsay uncorroborated statement by a convicted felon, of another's opinion, he is really saying there is no evidence...
...It is still quite easy to distinguish those on the right from those on the left if based on the person's total outlook and not just on one or two issues...
...pro-Israel lobby has, and the kid-glove treatment of Israel itself...
...Professor Bradford's heresy, in Frum's view, is that he regards Abraham Lincoln with insufficient adoration...
...Buchanan has much more nearly been the "bashee' rather than the "basher" on issues which members of the neocon community have chosen to characterize as anti-Semitic...
...Why is it "sly Jew-baiting" to denounce the extraordinary influence the U.S...
...The founders of the conservative movement, especially William F. Buckley, Jr., understood that just as the left has a sad history of cozying up to America's foreign enemies, the right has in the past pandered to America's darkest prejudices...
...Buchanan is "a man with festering grievances," "he snarled," "Buchanan laments," etc...
...So what does that make me...
...As for Buchanan's playing the "barroom bully" to "poor old Norman Podhoretz," that "little guy in glasses" —isn't this the same "poor old Norman" who commissioned the hit on Pat in Commentary a few months back, a smear job so sloppy and mean-spirited that dissenting letters in the next issue were voluminous even by the standards of that redoubtable journal...
...C C Wooding Carson City, Nevada The American Spectator is renowned for its irreverent commentaries, so I wonder if its Buchanan-bashing means it has kowtowed to conservatism's sacred cows...
...As one who has read and admired Buchanan for years, I do not believe that his defense of traditional norms, rooted communities, and the minimal state can be dismissed so facilely as mere racist nativism...
...More to the point, silence or the failure to oppose allows a presumption of agreement if it allows a presumption of anything...
...Paul Gottfried at The Catholic University of America when its Department of Politics sought to appoint him as a visiting professor...
...he doesn't engage opponents, he "stomps them...
...Soviet missiles, which grow more numerous with each passing day, are still targeted on us...
...Just another activist trying to determine what is in the best long-term interests of the United States...
...And yes, Mr...
...Your views give me more comfort and confidence in the conservative movement...
...David Frum has accurately detailed my feelings about Pat's direction in the conservative "movement...
...Arab missiles are not aimed at our homes and families...
...Missouri City, Texas Who is this guy David Frum...
...Frum is correct that a junior prof...
...Frum's case is a 1970 notation by John Ehrlichman, quoted in a 1991 book, and purporting to give President Nixon's opinion that Buchanan was a segregationist...
...By redefining conservatism along neoconservative lines, Frum has in a self-serving manner effectively marginalized and dismissed from- the conservative fold the Old Right, e.g., Buchanan, Russell Kirk, Thomas Fleming, and Paul Gottfried...
...TAS seems to think that what promotes fights for Don King will work for TAS...
...how much ethnocultural diversity is compatible with traditional American institutions is a valid question...
...I read with some interest and a great deal of disapproval the article trashing Pat Buchanan by a David Frum...
...Jeffrey Rubin Ftedericksburg, Virginia Pat is the Mickey Mantle of political commentary...
...Trees, one really can impute greatness to Martin Luther King...
...Howard Phillips, Chairman The Conservative Caucus Washington, D.C...
...Buchanan is . . . gulp . . . "uncandid" Frum tells us repeatedly...
...Frum and Tyrrell take offense at the figures that I give for neocon philanthropy earmarked for The American Spectator...
...Normally, successful and well-paid editors are the most immune to shabby journalism...
...What I was looking for was a balanced analysis of the conflicting views of these two warring camps on such defining issues as egalitarianism, democratic capitalism, global democracy, and the welfare state...
...Maybe he hopes to win those outfits to his side...
...Conservatism in America today is more diverse than Pat likes, and conservatives have enough wrinkles in their gray matter to ignore him...
...That's the only consistency I want or need...
...If Mr...
...According to Frum, Buchanan writes for "a local (NYC) tabloid," not a newspaper...
...I have since discontinued my subscription to PJB/FTR and extended my subscriptions to National Review and, of course, TAS...
...David Frum's cover story, prominently headlined "The Conservative Bully Boy," is an exquisitely squalid example of a political hit job...
...In none of my relevant comments do I suggest that Norman Podhoretz owns the Catholic Church or, what is even less likely, that the Catholic Church has effective control over Catholic University...
...From what I've read by Norman Podhoretz, he's no 98-1b...
...The man's opinions are carried by some newspapers and he makes occasional television appearances, sometimes replacing noted conservatives on talk shows...
...Some editors get to know it better than others...
...Well, a man has a right to pick his own enemies...
...culture, really a matter of no concern or even exultation on conservatives' parts...
...Mel Bradford's point about Lincoln is that The Great Emancipator framed the Civil War in apocalyptic, religious imagery (as in the Gettysburg Address) that transformed the conflict into an exercise in hysterical propaganda and mass murder...
...And in the context of the interview, his response might have meant more: for example, that he had known and approved of the actions taken against me...
...Buchanan is an anti-Semite...
...Sorry, Mr...
...Buchanan for his opposition to a Martin Luther King holiday (an opposition shared by conservatives who have opposed making a hero of a man whose personal life might, by comparison, permit Ted Kennedy to become a candidate for sainthood, and whose public support was for the agenda of the hard left, ranging from abortion to support for the Vietcong), he asserts that Buchanan's "real message is inseparable from his sly Jew-baiting and his not-so-sly queer-bashing...
...ShOuldn't our self-interest be part of our policy toward Israel even as with all other nations...
...is a menace (whether it is is a separate issue from the one at hand) why is it inconsistent for a conservative to advocate the necessary government intervention...
...Frum had been really interested in the facts of this academic cause dAre, he could have inquired into the roles of various individuals outside and inside the University in blocking Gottfried's appointment...
...The correctness of the assertion is established to Frum's satisfaction because in 1990 Buchanan supported Arizona's right to decide at the polls not to have a Martin Luther King holiday...
...While you're at it, can you tell me why ostracizing a journalist like Buchanan is different from universities branding outspoken professors as politically incorrect, and why you don't turn yourself in to your own 800 thought police number...
...Frum tells us Buchanan is against civil rights and sighs: "What decent person is against civil rights...
...Nazism likely would have died out sooner, to boot...
...Frum's article gives muckraking a bad name...
...The author of that particular diatribe, however, had the good taste not to attempt to estimate Mr...
...But Buchanan's positions on Big Government and non-interventionism are inconsistent...
...Make room for the gringo, muchachos...
...weakling but a pretty formidableopponent...
...Buchanan's desire to excommunicate the neoconservatives is as risible a scheme as his Latin Mass project...
...But I do know that, whatever's pushing him, he's heading in a dangerous direction...
...In both cases he shows he's lost touch with those whom he claims he represents, and is really only Ted Turner's caricature of a conservative...
...Assuming this was not the kind of judgment that Jacob Neusner offers in comparative studies of Syriac-speaking Jews and Christians in late antiquity, it could only mean that Podhoretz was giving off nasty vibes...
...He really can't explain how they are able to do it, but he and others in the Frum brotherhood "know where it is...
...he doesn't opine, he "snarls...
...Larry T Killen San Angela Texas Pat's column, based on the theory that if you "follow the money" some things become explicable, has generated a slew of attacks whose extent and intensity seems disproportionate...
...W Wesley McDonald Assoc...
...O'Rourke's annual salary...
...Frum . . . implicitly and explicitly discounts the continuing moral and geopolitical case for opposing Soviet imperialism and Communist aggression, even as he suggests that Saddam Hussein poses a greater threat to liberty than do the Black Berets, the Red Army, the KGB, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...Frum for having to write about the person all "couth conservatives want to escape...
...Not one line of legitimate criticism...
...Here's what I argued: The quarrels that Patrick Buchanan says he's got with "neoconservatives" are indeed legitimate matters of dispute...
...But Mr...
...The essence of Frum's article is summed up in his comments on the heroic dissenter M. E. Bradford, the man who did not become chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...Frum's charge of Buchanan's racism belongs in a real tabloid like the Sun of London, if they would throw away their standards to print it...
...Almost clairvoyantly they detect the concealed sense of unrewarded merit that renders an editor-in-chief susceptible to the Caw of the Shabby...
...What...
...he doesn't question, he is "suspicious of economic activity he doesn't understand...
...Ross Nelson Milwaukee, Wisconsin About the one thing no one else but David Frum would ever think to call Pat Buchanan—t'uncandid"!—would serve well to describe Frum's own recent article...
...Like Irving Kristol, Mr...
...He must have crawled over from the Nation...
...Where did you find this prkiewc...
...There is, alas, nothing "weird" about my accusation against Jerry Z. Muller of the Catholic University of America history department, who cooperated with his chairman Jon Wakelyn and with Frum's mentor from the University of Toronto, Thomas Pangle, to blacken my professional reputation...
...I'm a little weary of the charge of "denying the Holocaust" being applied to people who, like myself, don't believe "gas chambers" ever were used or that 6 million Jews were killed...
...But Frum's sophomoric overheated rhetoric and 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 baseless accusations thoroughly enervate his position...
...For this investigation I have depended on the cooperation of the recipients of malicious phone calls and on those who were present when they took place...
...Frum's cavalier treatment of this entire affair confirms a spreading belief that some who make a big show of battling political correctness on the campus would simply like to replace one form of correctness with another...
...David Frum asserts charges of kookiness without argument, using snippets of Buchanan's views as prima facie evidence...
...Whatever the case, any man who is willing to provoke American Jewry and refuses to back down is no mere bully...
...I thank William Hawkins and Chuck Fowler for their thoughtful replies...
...Nelson, America's involvement in World War II really was worthwhile...
...And so, just as any left that wants to go anywhere in American politics is now obliged to prove its patriotism, the right needs to prove that it's not composed of haters...
...the weakening of the Soviet Union does raise the issue of how involved America must continue to be in the problems of other countries...
...The key is to stay receptive to alternative conclusions if based on sound principles and shared core values...
...From Paul Weyrich and William Rusher all the way down to Lyn Nofziger, columns and letters to the editor have been commissioned to putatively set the record straight...
...Buchanan's attack on "neoconservatism" is not inspired by substantial political differences, but by something else...
...Yes, he strikes out a lot, but he also hits some prodigious home runs...
...SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY RESPONSES TO FRUM'S BUCHANAN David Frum's piece trashing Pat Buchanan ("The Conservative Bully Boy," TAS, July 1991) smells more like the "Israel iiber alles" lobby trying to avenge perceived anti-Israel and pro-U.S...
...Frum should know, Mr...
...could not have pulled it off by himself, but no one is claiming that Muller went after me without assistance...
...Finally, I confess to awe at Frum's special ability to know just where Buchanan's kind of conservatism shades in "Kook-land...
...Frum's attacks on Pat Buchanan are full of gross distortions and slanderous judgments...
...This is normal for any movement that is creative and dynamic...
...It's quite obvious on which side the David Frums will be on if they do...
...Not Tyrrell...
...First of all, as Mr...
...He sounds like an A. M. Rosenthal clone...
...On the question of "queer-bashing," Mr...
...It is a strength if it is used to stimulate thought and refine arguments...
...Too bad he does not occupy the number one seat in the Blue and White House...
...And if drug use in the U.S...
...More than that, without 'tarot cards or other paraphernalia, Frum is able to tell us just what goes on in the mind of someone like Pat Buchanan as he makes the trek from respectability to inhabitant of "Kook-land...
...Frum denigrates the worthiness of the Baltic peoples' aspirations for liberation...
...Other publications have discussed them exhaustively...
...They take more time in- reading the long wordproccessed files a little more spitefully...
...Criticize Patrick Buchanan on any point—his protectionism, his support for a national sales tax, his preference for Nixon over Reagan in 1968, his calling other conservatives "fleas who conclude they are steering the dog" and what comes flooding into your mailbox...
...Don Nemetz Seaside, Oregon Alexander Pope settled the score with his enemies by portraying them as soiling themselves in their own excrement, frolicking in sewer slime, and vomiting and urinating on one another...
...Nobody's suggesting that conservatives must approve of reverse discrimination, aid to Israel's socialist economy, women in the military, or the gay-rights political agenda...
...He may be a fool, but he's entitled to respect for his guts...
...That's what rhetoric teachers call begging the question and honest people call desperation, as when Ron Brown accuses President Bush of embracing the politics of David Duke by opposing the Democrats' civil rights bill...
...I have not yet made up my mind what was meant by "the final solution...
...In point of fact the annual haul for the magazine is not half, as they assert, but about a tenth of the amount that I cited...
...I am confused...
...He's too bright, too decent a man, to inquinate himself by mixing it up with a slubbergullion like Frum...
...When he referred to "Holocaust-denial nut," he got my full attention...
...Gottfried's exceedingly strange letter, but I can set his mind at ease on at least two points: I never attended the University of Toronto and Thomas Pangle has never in any sense been a mentor to me...
...Frum will not leave it there...
...he doesn't even make honest mistakes, his mistakes are "kookery...
...Fortunately, the movement has not yet formed such rigid schools...
...And the inhabitants of Shabby-ville have a curious power to anticipate which editors will be friendliest to them...
...His feelings about the Desert Shield/Storm operations left me pretty much bereft of respect for his insight, and I have ever since viewed him as an anachronous pundit totally lacking in real ideas for positive conservative change in America...
...Are conservative commentators excluded from forthright talk on gay "rights...
Vol. 24 • September 1991 • No. 9
