Pat Buchanan

Washington.-- Patrick Buchanan will never be president for many excellent reasons and one bad one.The bad reason is that he has spent most of his adult life as a purveyor of political opinions. Goodness knows we don't want television commentators elevated to genuine power. But a political system that punishes strongly held and vividly expressed opinions -- whatever their merits -- has defects of its own.Even now, ''negative research'' munchkins in the Bush campaign are undoubtedly plowing through thousands of Buchanan newspaper columns and television transcripts.

Conservative analyst Pat Buchanan Thursday night confirmed what some in the worlds of politics and cable TV believed to be true for months: He hadn't just been suspended by MSNBC in the wake of his latest controversial book, he was through and would never be back on the cable channel again. “My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end,” Buchanan wrote Thursday in a post at The American Conservative. “After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.” Buchanan had been suspended since shortly after the October publication of his book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

IN THE antebellum South, it was thought that many black slaves suffered from a certain psychological maladjustment. Their symptom was running away from the plantation.Now comes Patrick Buchanan, with his customary flair for wrapping common prejudice in a sheath of moral righteousness, with an analogous sort of complaint about our gay citizens. Patrick Buchanan writes that it wasn't the right wing that started what he likes to call the "cultural war" over gay rights. Rather, he says, it was "militant homosexuals who first stormed across society's old borders."

Patrick J. Buchanan -- former Nixon speechwriter, gadfly presidential candidate, and perpetual TV pundit -- knows how to stir a pot. This is, after all, a man who once described Earth Day as a great opportunity to "worship dirt" and Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory." Now 67, Buchanan shows no signs of mellowing with age. His latest book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, tackles the hot-button topic of immigration. With 160,000 copies sold in three weeks, it has already made the New York Times and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists.

Pat Buchanan has a unique advantage over all the other candidates of both parties. The man can't be embarrassed by anything he said or did in the past.An example is a letter that someone recently dug out of the Gerald Ford Library.Buchanan wrote the letter in 1974, asking President Ford to make him an ambassador.He had a specific country in mind where his political views would make him highly suitable for a diplomatic post because that country's government would like him.I'll give you three guesses which country Buchanan wanted to go to as our representative.

BY PUTTING Jack Kemp on his ticket J Republican presidential nominee Robert J. Dole has moved adroitly to counter the ugly image of intolerance implanted in the COOP platform by religious activists. Only a day before the surprise vice presidential selection was announced, Pat Buchanan's sister was bragging about a "Buchanan platform" and a "Buchanan convention." It won't be the latter. The Dole-Kemp duo will see to that.Yesterday Senator Dole made a point of saying he will not be bound by everything in the platform and, in fact, hadn't event read it. This reinforced the message of his choosing Mr. Kemp, whose whole career prepared him for his vow in Russell, Kansas, that the GOP will "represent the whole American family: No one will be left behind, and no one will be turned away."

Manchester, N.H. -- AT A press conference the morning after his strong New Hampshire vote against President Bush, Republican challenger Pat Buchanan ran into a wall of skeptical questions about where he goes from here.Robert Teeter, the Bush campaign manager, had just predicted on network television that Mr. Buchanan had gotten about as far as he was going to get, and that the president would win every primary between now and the Super Tuesday contests, mostly in the South, on March 10.Questioners reminded Mr. Buchanan that he was not going to find any of the approaching states as hospitable on the economic issue as New Hampshire, where unemployment exceeds the national average and voters were clearly angry at Mr. Bush for not paying attention to their plight.

Patrick J. Buchanan -- former Nixon speechwriter, gadfly presidential candidate, and perpetual TV pundit -- knows how to stir a pot. This is, after all, a man who once described Earth Day as a great opportunity to "worship dirt" and Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory." Now 67, Buchanan shows no signs of mellowing with age. His latest book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, tackles the hot-button topic of immigration. With 160,000 copies sold in three weeks, it has already made the New York Times and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists.

Cheer up. Pat Buchanan is back in the race.

You'll know Israel and the Arabs are getting somewhere when they start jointly kicking the U.S.Don't confuse the current Japanese with their grandparents, lest they return the compliment.Gorby won't buy Yeltsin's latest scheme. Which is, however, not proof that most Russians do.David Duke is Pat Buchanan without the resume, and vice versa.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The last time the Reform Party held a national convention here, in early 2000, members were shouting and shoving, with maybe a blow or two struck, and the police were called in to restore order, or some semblance of it. So when the party, or what is left of it after its minuscule showing in Election 2000, convened here this weekend for another national convention, the big question was: Will they shout and shove again? There was some shouting, but almost all in the form of cheers or exuberant debate.

Gore. Rhymes with (A) bore; (B) more; (C) roar; or (D) adore. Choose no more than two. Lieberman is very vice presidential in manner and speech, which leaves Al nothing to do but move up. Republicans want the world made safe for inherited money, but the Democrats hold out for inherited office. The final indignity for Pat Buchanan is that he is a figure no longer of menace but of fun.

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- If Ross Perot were dead, he'd roll over in his grave to see what's happened to the Reform Party he founded. He's not, but he doesn't seem to care. Four years ago in this same coastal city, Mr. Perot ran a tightly controlled self-coronation with only minor opposition from former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm. In the election that followed, Mr. Perot's vote fell from the 19 percent he had won in his first presidential run in 1992 as an independent to only 8 percent. But it was enough to entitle this year's Reform Party nominee to $12.6 million under federal campaign law. With that kind of money, there seemed to be a fair chance at the start of 2000 that the new party could gain a real toehold in presidential politics if Mr. Perot finally stepped aside and a good new candidate could be recruited.

The state of MD cannot prove that Linda Tripp taped anybody: So all of this never happened; it was just a dream. The national economic boom must be ending. It just reached downtown Baltimore and that's usually a leading indicator. Hezbollah is no threat to Israel. It is a very grave threat to Lebanon. This year's hot contest is between two old warhorses, Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader, for the soul of Reform

IT'S HARD to imagine a more unlikely champion for America's working people than Pat Buchanan.Buchanan served as an adviser to pro-business presidents, Nixon and Reagan, and has spent most of his life as a Washington insider. But just pick up a newspaper or flick on the TV, and you'll find him shaking hands with beleaguered steel-workers or telling farmers and ranchers that they are "getting the shaft" because the U.S. government won't force other nations to open their markets.And recently, with images of the rioting in Seattle fresh in the public's memory, Buchanan told members of the Texas Reform Party that the protesters had "outed the World Trade Organization."

WASHINGTON -- In abandoning her presidential candidacy this week, Elizabeth Dole spoke a simple truth when she said "the bottom line is money." She lacked the necessary financial backing so it was "futile to continue."While money was a key problem, she did run second or third in most polls and drew large crowds. But the treasuries of two rivals for the GOP presidential nomination -- Texas Gov. George W. Bush and magazine publisher Steve Forbes -- were too formidable.Mr. Bush raised such an incredible amount -- about $50 million in the first half of this year and another $20 million in the third quarter.

You don't lose weight by buying products. You lose weight by not buying products.Diggers found a 17-million-year-old rhinoceros in Delaware, but it was extinct.Now George wants to aid Russia. He is more afraid of Dick Nixon than of Pat Buchanan.

May this April 19 prove to be not memorable.Bill reached agreement with the Japanese, not to discuss trade.The city has to hold the line on property taxes by raising income taxes, because that is what the big counties did.Pat Buchanan will behave, up to a point, for now, maybe.Pub Date: 4/19/96

Pakistan tried every form of government. None works.The Nobel Prize for medicine went to a German at Rockefeller U.; chemistry to an Egyptian at Cal Tech; physics to a Dutchman at Michigan; and economics to a Canadian at Columbia, so don't knock foreign docs.Pat Buchanan and Lenora Fulani make a lovely couple.The most effective way to cull the deer herd in suburbia is to introduce wolves.

News is when Peter does nothing.Giuliani is running against Arnold Lehman for the upstate vote, while Mrs. Clinton goes global against Pat Buchanan.A lot of Democrats want to run against one Clinton or the other or both, but young George W. Bush (no fool he) has decided to run against the Republican Congress.You can't keep a good Dow down.Pub Date: 10/08/99