Suicide by Free Trade

[brokensymmetry]

Okay, there are some paragraphs in the original article that are pretty offensive (and untrue :grr: ) about Democrats and soon-to-be-President Kerry, but there are some points that I think are well worth noting.

First and foremost, Pat Buchanan seems to be saying that * is toast, and that we've got a real chance of getting the House and Senate back as long as Chimpy keeps up his free trade act. Here are some of the best items, excerpted from the total article.

----------excerpt begins------------------

If President Bush is going to spend eight months as a traveling salesman for free trade and a crusader against “protectionism,” as his father did, he is inviting the same result his father got.

If the GOP persists in this free-trade fanaticism, it is courting suicide. For the policy is not working in the eyes of the people. And if Republicans insist the returns from global free trade—a disintegrating dollar and a merchandise trade deficit of $550 billion a year and rising—are good for America, folks are going to conclude that Republicans are too out of it to govern.

Given that the GOP today controls both Houses of Congress and the White House, this may sound alarmist. Yet GOP dominance today does not approach what it was in the 1920s under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, before the wipeout.

Indeed, if the issue is jobs, Republicans ought to be thrown out. For not only are they not creating them, they have no idea how to stop exporting them. In their hearts, some of them think it a good thing. They are like the doctors of old who sincerely believed bleeding the patient was the way to get rid of the disease because that is what their textbooks and wise men told them.

--------------end excerpt--------------------

Link: http://www.amconmag.com/2004_04_12/buchanan.html

[JohnyCanuck]

1. And that's you too Mr. Krugman.

They are like the doctors of old who sincerely believed bleeding the patient was the way to get rid of the disease because that is what their textbooks and wise men told them.

[drumwolf]

2. Buchanan stopped being a GOP partisan a very long time ago.

He still has a lot of opinions that I find quite offensive, but he is pretty much the opposite of a GOP propagandist nowadays. Not only does he differ with the Republicans on free trade, but he also very vigorously opposed the neocons' agenda in Iraq.

[brokensymmetry]

3. It's amazing -

the entire neocon thing. It's really neither liberal nor conservative; it's something else. At the risk of using a cliche, it seems purely fascist.

I think that Buchanan is an anti-fascist, as are we.

[bonemachine]

4. Did someone say

Strange bedfellows?

[JCMach1]

5. Precisely, it's fascism

A true patriot should understand that...

Left or Right