Here’s a surefire prediction: Pat Buchanan
won’t be elected President of the United States this go-around.
Or, anytime.
Not as easy to predict, however, is whether Cable News Network (CNN)
will welcome Buchanan back as a six-figure "Crossfire" panelist after this
latest failed White House bid, and again provide Buchanan a forum for ideas that even
Beltway colleagues are saying are sounding crackpot.
I confess to being a throwback to the television era of Murrow,
Severeid, Collingwood, Cronkite, Brinkley, et al, when television commentators were
selected for intelligence and meaningful perspective they provided through broad
experience, not self-serving ambition.
We should be so lucky today.
Increasingly, television recruits panelists who’re unabashed
shills for partisan viewpoints and are unapologetic about their biases, and thus cannot
and will not provide honest perspective.
Occasionally, first rate observers slip through to provide honest
judgments and objective interpretations of public events and figures.
Buchanan, however, uses CNN to promote himself and an agenda
that’s been repudiated by voters and major political parties.
But after Buchanan’s past defeats, CNN offered him his old slot to
keep his quirky ambitions alive for another try.
Even the eccentric Reform Party, a group in search of an idea and a
candidate, probably will find Buchanan’s ideas too gamy to embrace.
Most of us who’ve known Buchanan in various incarnations for
20-some years as Nixon speechwriter, newspaper columnist, TV commentator and presidential
wannabe have watched in sadness as his views deteriorate from merely idiosyncratic to
positively loony.
At times, he’s downright juvenile (when he suits up like a Three
Stooges sheriff and calls followers his "Pitchfork Brigade").
Other times, he’s irrelevant (when his "America First"
ideas seem to advocate a barrier be built on the U.S. shoreline).
Now he’s moved off the charts with his new book, "A Republic,
Not an Empire," a compendium of oddball theories that lead reasonable people to
conclude that Buchanan, among other things, is an apologist for Adolph Hitler and an
anti-Semite.
In one chapter, he argues that the United States had no vital interests
in going to war with Nazi Germany. Huh?
Which brings us back to CNN, and the question: what possible
intellectual value could Buchanan, repeatedly discredited, now bring to a premiere
network’s discourse on public affairs?
If CNN seeks to prove its tolerance for even the zaniest ideas in the
name of free speech, then California mass killer Charlie Manson surely qualifies to be a
knowledgeable commentator on social behavior, and Monica Lewinsky has the credentials for
discussing failed love with a married man.
Sadly, the possibility is that CNN will welcome Buchanan back to its
ranks as a political freak, much as a carnival sideshow’s bearded lady, to lure the
curious to watch an oddball who seems to have lost more than his political footing.
