Buchanan Was Misrepresented

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I read your reluctant endorsement of President Bush with great interest, and one sentence in particular caught my attention: "The future of the Republican Party--admittedly, not usually a prime concern of The Crimson--is at stake."

Actually, I think the future of the Republican Party is one thing you do care about--you want it to lose the coming elections. What you really don't care about are minor details like accuracy and fairness when writing about the Republican Party and its candidates, especially Pat Buchanan.

One glaring inaccuracy is your charge that Buchanan is an anti-Semite, which you backed up solely by saying, "even his archconservative pal William Buckley admits it." I am happy that you trust Buckley, but I don't think that's what he meant at all when he wrote about Buchanan in the December 30 issue of National Review, although his words have been misinterpreted. In the March 16 issue of National Review, Buckley wrote the following in response to a letter signed by 13 prominent conservatives:

"I wrote that the content of Mr. Buchanan's quoted remarks was indeed anti-Semitic, 'whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.' In short, I communicated my own private guess that Buchanan is not anti-Semitic."

So really, you didn't use any evidence whatsoever to back up this charge. But I guess you don't have to use facts in editorials, or mention that Buchanan emphatically denies the charge, or that his Maryland campaign chair is Jewish.

If you think he is anti-Semitic, you should at least present some proof. I suggest that you were so eager to denounce Buchanan that it really didn't matter if you knew what you were talking about or not.

Equating Buchanan with David Duke is also entirely inaccurate. It seems to me that Duke has coopted Buchanan's rhetoric, and not vice versa. Buchanan has been penning his conservative opinions for decades, while Duke is only a recent (and quite dubious) convert to conservatism.

And as William F. Buckley (whose opinions you seem to respect) wrote in the December 30 issue of National Review, "The linkage [of Duke and Buchanan] is morally irresponsible....Duke the sometime KKK wizard and Nazi enthusiast is as reasonably linked with Buchanan as Norman Thomas is with Stalin." That is to say, not very.

Does Buchanan really use "Dukesque racial code words"? No. You just took his words out of context. What Buchanan did was to express his opinion that America is a Western nation. To illustrate his point, he merely said that one million English immigrants would probably adapt more easily to American society than would one million Zulu immigrants. Does anyone really doubt that this is true? You not only do not know what he was trying to say, you don't seem to care either.

Do you think that your dislike for Buchanan gives you the right to say anything that will harm his chances for election or hurt his reputation, even if false? Do you ever bother to find out what your opponents have actually said and done?

Do you ever wonder why The Crimson is regarded with such contempt by most people on this campus? Emil J. Kiehne '94