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Buchanan's
World Pravda columnist Pat Buchanan has called Washington's American Enterprise Institute the "Politburo of the War Party." In his latest column, he adds that it is also
"Centcom for the War Party" -- a pretty impressive institution, to be sure.
Buchanan
also calls Newt Gingich "front man for the neoconservatives" --
something of which Newt has surely never been accused before, and an
accusation made all the more strange by the recent criticism of
Gingrich by some notable neocons.
"Consider the site Newt chose to launch his attack," says Buchanan.
"The American Enterprise Institute, the creation of Lebanese-American
William Baroody Sr., was begun as a think tank with ties to Taft-Goldwater Republicans. In the 1990s, it was captured by neocons
and converted into their principal nesting ground inside the Beltway."
Why the emphasis on Baroody's ethnicity? Perhaps to emphasize the alien
presence of those Jews who commandeered his institution in the 1990s?
In
point of fact, Baroody, unlike Buchanan, saw no opposition between his
Lebanese ethnicity and supporting neoconservatism. Here is Irving Kristol, in his Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, on his relationship with Baroody and
AEI:
Bill Baroody Sr., head of the American Enterprise Institute, a small conservative "think tank" in Washington, had been reading The Public Interest and The Wall Street Journal
and sensed that something new and enlivening was occurring. He got in
touch with me, offered me an honorary title of "associate fellow" (or
some such thing), and a connection was established….In the course of
the 1970s and 80s, Bill made a determined effort to recruit "neoconservatives" to
AEI, and did in fact recruit, early on, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Ben Wattenberg, as well as many others as
the years proceeded. Kristol himself was a visiting fellow
in residence at AEI in 1976-77 -- far in advance of the supposed neocon
putsch of the 1990s.
But an amiable relationship between
traditional conservatives and neoconservatives -- not to mention
between Lebanese and Jews -- doesn't fit into Buchanan's Manichean
vision of American politics, where clandestine forces of darkness (the "neocons," the "War Party," "militant Zionists," the "Amen Corner
commentariat," the "Tom Delay-AIPAC Republicans") plot and fight
against Buchanan's beleaguered America in an all-out war (Buchanan
Brigade, man the barricades!). Buchanan wasn't always like this -- the
acknowledgements section in his book Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories suffuses with praise, believe it or not, for Irving Kristol (which is why, I would guess, the book doesn't appear on his CV). But he's now gone mad, and it's an entertaining, but disturbing,
spectacle.
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