Pat Buchanan, over the falls with the revolutionary right

Goldwater-Rockefeller Redux

Pat is urging them to drive off the cliff.

He is retrospectively defending the John Birch Society.

He is siding absolutely with the tea-baggers, as George Will has lately done.

Make no mistake.

The tea-baggers dominate the Republican Party because they are a pop emanation of the decades old conservative movement.

And the conservative movement dominates the Party.

Hell, there’s almost nothing else in it!

I left this comment on Pat’s piece, responding specifically to these remarks as well as the whole thing.

A piece that, by the way, dishonestly omits any mention of the varying ransom demands that have accompanied in recent weeks every Republican offer to fund government, in whole or in part.

Pat’s remarks.

Why, after all, did Republicans stand up? Because they believe Obamacare is an abomination, a new entitlement program this nation, lurching toward bankruptcy, cannot afford.

It is imposing increases in health care premiums on millions of Americans, disrupting doctor-patient relationships and forcing businesses to cut workers back to 29 hours a week. Even Democratic Sen. Max Baucus has predicted a coming "train wreck."

Now if the Republican Party believes this, what choice did the House have except to fight to defund or postpone it, against all odds, and tune out the whining of the "We-can't-win!" Republican establishment?

My response.

Wow. What choice did they have? Spoken like anyone defending terrorism.

And here we see a "conservative" of many years urging a minority in one half of one branch of government to trash both the government and the economy if it can't be an American committee of public safety.

And all this to destroy the real America, the America of modest social democracy and moderate secularism, and force on the country a phony vision of a past that never was.

You guys are no more conservatives than the Italian Fascists or the German Nazis.

You want to destroy the real America, which you hate, and replace it with a New America that no more resembles our real past than Mussolini's Italy resembled the Roman Empire.