Pat Buchanan, Conservative On The Menu Too



(image via timeinc)

Pity Pat Buchanan, rogue 1950s sitcom character in search of a thoroughly segregated neighborhood. The world has moved on from where Pat Buchanan would like it to be. If life were fair, Buchanan would be torturing Tonto, the Lone Ranger's sidekick, on a midcentury radio serial while issuing a diabolical laugh. Or maybe -- if the cosmos were kind to crypto-racists -- Pat Buchanan would be hosing African-Americans trying to integrate an elementary school. But life, as JFK so presciently declared, is not fair.

Last week, Buchanan celebrated his 70th birthday. Two days later, on election day, his precious southern strategy -- one of his most disgusting legacies -- unravelled as Barack Obama snatched North Carolina and Virginia from the sausage-fingers of the bloated Republican Party. And now there's a negro in the White House! As Buchanan never had children, this ideological legacy probably was his lasting contribution to his name. As the French say, tant pis!

Buchanan's conservatism -- if that's what it is -- is so extreme, so "Old Right," that even William F. Buckley, Jr, the founder of modern American conservatism remarked in the early 90s, when Pat was writing columns attacking Israel and vigorously defending alleged ex-Nazi's, "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism .." Buchanan's "conservatism" is so extreme, so organic, that it governs even his choice of foodstuffs. From PageSix:

"PAT Buchanan and his wife, Shelley, are super careful about ordering dinner. At San Pietro the other night, the former presidential candidate spent 20 minutes with the missus studying the menu. 'Without a single word between them, they pored over the bill of fare and analyzed every single offering in minute detail,' said a witness. So intense was the Buchanans' laserlike concentration on the menu, another patron called over restaurateur Gerardo Bruno and said, 'For Christ's sake, will you please go over there and recommend something?" The proprietor replied: 'I've tried, but that's Pat Buchanan, and he likes to make up his own mind.'"

""-- Boy the way Glenn Miller played ...") That's not conservatism, by the way; that's tempermental thickheadedness. ("Songs that made the Hit Parade ..") Does it really take that long to order a goddam steak and potatoes with a tallboy an of domestic "suds" ("Guys like us, we had it made ..")? Because that's the sort of fare a type like Buchanan strikes us as really enjoying with real abbondanza ("Those were the days"). The meal, of course, would be delivered by a "colored" waiter, who would deliver forced banter -- to which Buchanan would be entirely oblivious -- saying how great "Miss Shelley" looked (" ... And you know who you were then. Girls were girls and men were men ..").



Those nutty Buchanans! (image via juliezicfoose)