Self-Service With A Smile

Pat Buchanan is still a colossal racist asshole, but Joan Walsh's review of Buchanan's new book is almost as bad as she spends nearly every word lashing together a raft to float on the sea of Uncle Pat's haterade just to show how morally superior she is when it comes to the really, terribly high bar of calling him out on his rampant racism.  It's not like that's difficult to do, you merely have to possess a working soul and some basic self-awareness, but Walsh strays dangerously close to using Buchanan's odious tract to play the "earth may be flat, views differ" game, almost as if she has a need to do so....and then does a terrible job of it.  This is evident in the last third of the piece, especially these two paragraphs.  First:

The end of the book contains Buchanan’s template for success in 2012, which consists of restricting trade, halting immigration, slashing federal spending and — one point many progressives will agree with – “dismantling the empire,” and dramatically cutting military spending. (There’s a reason why when I first started out doing MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” I frequently agreed with Buchanan, as long as we discussed the Iraq war.)

Now, let's understand the context here:  Walsh has just spent about 2000 words up until this point saying that at best Buchanan is Gollum, a creature driven by his most base desires that should be pitied and viewed as an instructional relic, a walking warning label who serves best as a cautionary tale...and then on arguably the most important single American policy decision in the last ten years, she says she "frequently agreed" with Buchanan.  I'm a little confused by that, it certainly seems Walsh more than pities the man if she can see eye to eye on him on Iraq.  She's saying he has his good points too, after spending so much time portraying him as without redemption.

Then a couple paragraphs down comes this:

But it’s also as if he’s decided to lose the larger war. I can’t imagine giving up on my country, my party and even my religion, just because the people who had come to share it didn’t quite look like me. I take this book seriously because I owe a certain debt to Pat Buchanan. Doing television with this infamous Irish Catholic conservative, I began to reflect seriously for the first time on the vision of America I grew up with. It was handed to me by my parents, working-class Irish Catholics who believed in e pluribus unum – that those words made their inclusion possible, and they would stretch forward to make sure the civil rights movement accomplished its goals, too.

The bolded sentences need to be considered individually.  First, she can't imagine "giving up" on her country, party and religion, which is a reasonable statement in and of itself but missing one phrase that most of us would have included:  "my president".  It's a curious omission given Walsh's recent history...or perhaps it's completely explained by that history.  She notes that Buchanan had given up on a number of Republican politicians, but she leaves out her "support" of President Obama and he's only mentioned by name in the paragraph directly above the this one, in reference to Buchanan's plan to defeat him.

Secondly, the notion that Walsh owes Buchanan a debt is just terribly creepy.  If Buchanan is as awful as Walsh says he is in the preceding piece, then what kind of history must they have had together that she feels she still owes the guy, as hate-filled and bigoted as he is?  You don't go out of your way to admit you owe someone like Buchanan a debt if you find him morally bankrupt.  It's not like Buchanan has been accidentally trapped by a bad hand in life or anything, his choices were repugnant, his reasoning flawed, and his rationale outright racist at times.  He's still employed at MSNBC and still writes books, so it's not like he's destitute.

She rightfully tears the guy a new asshole and then at the end says "Well you know, not only is he not terrible, but I owe him."  It's like Walsh is trying to have the benefit of attacking Buchanan while still showing she's even-handed and centrist by saying he's not that bad of a person.  I've got news for her:

He's that bad of a person.  Christ.  I knew I wasn't fond of Walsh but this piece is awful.