Pat Buchanan Hates Clowns?

Perennial right-wing candidate Pat Buchanan is speaking today at the Institute of Politics, and in preparation for his visit, I decided to check out his campaign website. Not knowing the website's name, I decided to take a few guesses--and guessed wrong. Below is an actual account of what transpired. (If you don't believe me, try it yourself.)

www.buchanan2000.com: I started here because, well, it seemed like a natural name for the campaign website. It seems the anti-Buchananites got there first, though, since I was greeted with an ominous red-and-blue "Whose populism is it anyway?" and a cute cartoon of Buchanan holding a baseball bat with a nail in it standing behind a barbed-wire-protected border. The rest of the site listed controversial Buchanan statements on civil rights, Jews, women, etc. Clearly not something the campaign would have put together.

www.patbuchanan.com: This was the next stop. Yet the domain squatters got here too--the website redirected me to www.iguanatechnologies.com, which I assume is unaffiliated with Buchanan, unless he has more on iguanas in his platform than I knew about. Are Internet technologies out for candidates, and iguana technologies in? Strangely, Iguana Technologies' website consists solely of two periods and a paragraph tag, saying little about their mission or what bizarre technical devices they might have constructed out of iguanas. I decided to move on.

www.gopatgo.com: I was sure, at this point, that I would find something on Buchanan--after all, "Go, Pat, Go!" is his campaign slogan and a perfect name for a website. Yet this too resulted in disaster. I was instantly redirected to, of all places, ihateclowns.com, a website devoted to the exposure of clowns as one of the greatest threats to modern society. "There are people in this world who dress up and act like clowns," the diatribe on the main page reads; "I don't like these people. I am not clownophobic...I do not fear clowns. Really. I don't. They are just not nice people. They scare little kids, they cause neurosis in some adults, they have big floppy feet, they try to fit too many of their kind in a car, I could go on and on." Visitors to the site can buy ihateclowns.com t-shirts, get free e-mail at ihateclowns.com, participate in chats about the evils of clowns, play an animated punch-a-clown game, review "34 reasons why you should hate clowns" (Reason #14: "A clown ate the dog that ate my homework") and even compose anti-clown poetry, such as this haiku: "Clowns mess up our kids / And anger all their parents / Clowns are evil things."

O brave new world that has such people in't...

www.buchanan.org: Although not the official campaign site, this site (of "The Internet Brigade") was at least affiliated with Buchanan. It featured a large animated graphic decorated with clover that read, "Just as St. Patrick drove the Snakes out of Ireland, Our Patrick will Drive the Snakes out of Washington D.C.!"

www.buchanan2000.org: This site was perhaps, after Iguana Technologies, the most enigmatic. It said only, "Welcome to the future website of Buchanan2000.org," and had a picture of a timepiece set to 4:03.

www.yahoo.com: Eventually, I caved. I went to Yahoo, looked up Buchanan, and found the official website at www.buchananreform.org. "Oh yeah," I thought. "He's in the Reform Party now." After all this, though, the real deal was pretty anticlimactic--all about OPEC and China policy. Now if only Buchanan had a position on clowns...