"WHERE THE RIGHT WENT WRONG"-by Pat Buchanan

Buchanan is a great guy and has always been right about many things but this book is mostly just another restatement of what he has been saying for years. If you don't know what he has been saying then you might consider it for sure, otherwise I can't really recommend it. In short, Buchanan is a rightist or conservative who wants, 1) a more aggressively conservative social agenda, 2) less free trade, and 3) a much less aggressive foreign policy, particularly as regards Israel and Iraq.

The quality of the arguments is average I'd say; not so much because Buchanan is dumb, he certainly isn't, but more because the arguments are shaped to sound like campaign rhetoric, which probably he intended, rather than rational academic thought; so what you can learn is somewhat limited.

The social issues are open to endless debate anyway. Buchanan does not seem to advance the cause much, but then again that would be a problem for almost anyone. On the Middle East I think he is quite right in suggesting that if we had pushed Israel toward peace at the '67 borders, rather than toward war and expansion in the West Bank, the Middle East and Osama Bin Ladin never would have been a problem, and all those dead or wounded people would now be alive or well.

On free trade he is simple wrong with his logic that all of our manufacturing jobs are going to low wage China and India. Buchanan was a typical Republican free trader until someone in New Hampshire asked him, during a presidential campaign, "how are you going to save my job from going overseas?" At that point truth was cast out the window in search of votes. Richard Nixon stated the truth best when he said, "America must produce world class goods." He knew that the more protected an industry was from domestic or foreign competition, the more inferior its goods and its country would become. He also knew that with each new individual with whom you are allowed to trade, no matter what city, state, or country he lives in, the wealthier you will become. Indeed, poverty and trade are inversely proportional.

On free trade and foreign policy he's actually closer to Democrats than modern day Republicans. Ideally he would want to purge the Republican Party of the neo-conservatives who have engineered the Middle East and 9/11 disasters, the free traders who rely on decades of established economic wisdom, and the weaklings who won't fight for conservative social issues such as, traditional marriage. It seems a long shot at best, but in the wake of George Bush's ideologically very confused administration, the Middle East debacle, the emergence of China and India as huge new trading partners, and the current insane fiscal policy, who knows what might happen. comments: bje1000@aol.com