Stephen Green at VodkaPundit reviews the post-WW2 historical record and uses it to demolish Pat Buchanan, who is alleged to be smart enough to have a syndicated column, and further alleged to be a conservative. I think neither allegation could be proven in a court of law. With Stephen, I would agree that PB has gone right round the bend. Or rather, I would say that his train has jumped completely off the track.

To reiterate what I said in his comments, I note that Stephen used the expression "the slippery slope from Young Turk conservative columnist to Nazi Apologist troglodyte" which, to me, seems to imply that both states can be found on the same political continuum.

I think that one would have to leave that continuum (I'd label it "Rationality") entirely to become a Jew-hating Nazi apologist, as Buchanan apparently has become, just as one would have to do in order to turn from, say, a "Scoop Jackson" Democrat into a Stalin apologist.

That minor gripe notwithstanding, I agree with Stephen. It is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the most deluded kind to believe that in the Summer of 1945 the western Allies could have prevented the Soviets from doing exactly however they pleased in the Eastern European nations they had "liberated" from the Nazis. Yes, it would have been technically possible, particularly given America's soon-to-be-revealed atomic weapon capability, but the price would have been far too high to pay.

It's long past time that serious people at any place on the aforementioned Rationality spectrum listened with anything other than revulsion (or at least, disgusted curiosity) to what Buchanan says.

Posted by Russ at 06:10 PM, May 12, 2005 in Idiots