LIE DOWN WITH DOGS...:

The red and the brown: With his new magazine, Pat Buchanan links the old right to the new left (Ronald Radosh, 10/13/2002, Boston Globe)

Above all, The American Conservative is antiwar. In his own signed contribution, Buchanan complains about ''a new triumphalist America'' that is leading us into ''an imperial war on Iraq.'' As one might expect, he believes that the '' war party'' is being manipulated by the Israeli government, which hopes that war with Iraq will provide an excuse to return to Lebanon ''and settle scores with Hezbollah.'' Buchanan goes on to claim that the Israelis are ''tugging at our sleeve, reminding us not to forget Libya.'' Meanwhile, Eric S. Margolis writes that the United States ''has been buttressing autocracy and despotism'' in the Middle East for years. As for Iraq, it ''has not committed any act of war against America,'' and to invade would be ''an act of brazen aggression.'' Writing from Britain, Stuart Reid cites the acerbically conservative writer Auberon Waugh to ask how a country of 15 million impoverished ''desert dwellers'' can conceivably be viewed as a ''threat to world peace.'' America, Reid writes, should not ''make a burnt offering of innocent Arabs.'' These are, to be certain, blame-America-first conservatives.

How did Buchanan come to this particular pass? The most obvious antecedents of his magazine lie in the old right of the 1930s and '40s - the pre-World War II isolationists, or ''noninterventionists,'' as they preferred to call themselves. Buchanan's ruminations over Israeli influence call to mind Charles Lindbergh's 1941 accusation that the drive to enter the war against Hitler was emanating from ''the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.'' These Jewish interventionists - neoconservatives, Buchanan might say now - were influential, Lindbergh said, because of their ''large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.''

The American Conservative proudly roots itself in this past by publishing Justin Raimondo's ode to ''the Old Right [who] knew something about the temptations of Empire.'' Raimondo is a gay conservative activist from San Francisco whose chief claim to fame is his single appearance on ''Politically Incorrect,'' when Bill Maher made fun of him for being one of the few openly gay supporters of Buchanan. Now Raimondo runs a Web site called antiwar.com, in which he extols the good old days of the America First Movement. For a short time, he points out, that movement included not only conservatives, but socialists like Norman Thomas and, in the period before the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Communist leader Earl Browder.

Indeed, it seems that Raimondo is now attempting to forge his own Red-Brown alliance, as Europeans refer to the coming together in post Soviet Russia of right-wing nationalists and unreconstructed Communists.

Man, who ever thought they'd see the day when Pat Buchanan would be another man's "batchelor" [expletive deleted]? Posted by Orrin Judd at October 18, 2002 7:39 PM