Saturday, August 13, 2016

Pat Buchanan's warning

In a piece he penned (is that now an archaic term?) for WorldNetDaily, Pat Buchanan agreed with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's assertion that the election is "rigged" and warning that "...if Hillary Clinton takes power, and continues America on her present course, which a majority of Americans rejected in the primaries, there is going to a bad moon rising."

I give Mr. Buchanan limited kudos for the CCR reference.  But comparing the 2016 campaign cycle to this point to the Arab Spring, even through the pretzels of Buchanan's twisted logic, is frightening.  It is the year of the outsider, but to a point.  Now that an outsider has been nominated, things are moving in another direction; because that outsider's true nature has become common knowledge.

It is not a rigging of the process by as Buchanan describes them, "...the oligarchs of Wall Street, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – backed by conscript editorial writers for newspapers that rely on ad dollars."  It is an electorate that has come to its senses that we cannot afford to put an ego-maniacal megalomaniac into the Oval Office that is changing the results of polling that shows Hillary Clinton to be the lesser of the two evils that we must choose between in November.


This recent movement from Mr. Trump to delegitimize the November election rings of prepackaging and marketing and Mr. Buchanan was on hand when the first successful "marketing" of a presidential candidate took place.  While Roger Ailes, Harry Treleaven, Frank Shakespeare and Leonard Garment were best known for the 1968 campaign of Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan was a part of the process.  There's a memo he wrote about the New Hampshire primary in the outstanding book on how Nixon was marketed, The Selling of the President.

Joe McGinniss, the author of that book, wrote something at the start of Chapter 2 that Donald Trump has taken to heart.  "Politics, in a sense, has always been a con game."  Donald Trump is the consummate con artist.  Seems like a match made in heaven.  The ultimate con man playing the ultimate con game.  He keeps telling us how great things will be under his reign, without giving any specifics about how he plans to make them great.

Let me leave you with an old, but still important, Pat Buchanan quote.  In a 2010 column concerning the nomination of Elena Kagan to the U. S. Supreme Court he wrote "If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the US population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this the Democrats' idea of diversity?"