Pat Buchanan Serious

Pat Buchanan: Are We Serious?

Once in a while, Mr. Buchanan makes a good point. Half of one, at least:

Jones, who sells t-shirts saying "Islam is of the Devil," may be an Islamophobe, but he is also a serious man, willing to live with the consequences of his deeds, even if he causes U.S. war casualties.

The questions raised by his deliberate provocation are not so much about him, then, as they are about us.

Are we a serious nation? Is Obama up to being a war president?

Constantly, we hear praise of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR as war leaders.

Yet President Lincoln arrested thousands of citizens and locked them up as security risks, while denying them habeas corpus. He shut newspapers and sent troops to block Maryland's elections, fearing Confederate sympathizers would win and take Maryland out of the Union.

President Wilson shut down antiwar newspapers, prosecuted editors, and put Socialist presidential candidate and war opponent Eugene Debs in prison, leaving him to rot until Warren Harding released him and invited the dangerous man over to the White House for dinner.

California Gov. Earl Warren and FDR collaborated to put 110,000 Japanese, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, into detention camps for the duration of the war and ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute antiwar conservatives.

During Korea, Harry Truman seized the steel mills when a threatened strike potentially imperiled production of war munitions. Richard Nixon went to court to block publication of the Pentagon papers until the Supreme Court decided publication could go forward.

This is not written to defend those war measures or those wars. It is to say that if a president takes a nation to war, and commits men to their deaths, as Obama did in doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he should be prepared to do what is within his power to protect those troops.

The other half of the argument has to do with whether this country, as opposed to those previous Americas, is willing to endure the President's use of such power. I think GEN Petraeus was right to speak as he did, but many seem to have considered it a stretch for a military officer even to mention that this idiot was likely to get troops killed so he could have his little show. The Drudge Report made a point of reminding us that the US military was in the Bible-burning business, but going out of its way to protect Korans from the same fate.

There's no doubt that the Muslim world reacts more harshly to desecration of its religious symbols than the Christian world; but that, as Buchanan says, is a problem with us, not with them.