GOM -
Now that PC isn’t getting the media it used to, I wonder if we’ll start seeing a marked increase in the accusations of “veiled bigotry”, just so they can keep their faces seen.

What is the meaning of a semisecret antisemtism? A Nixon would make hostile remarks about the Jews, but appointed the first Jewish Secretary of State and rescued Israel with arms shipments in 1973, because he concluded it was in the U.S. interest to do so. He may have privately disliked Jews, at least in the abstract, but that’s something far different from antisemitic agitation or politics.

There’s a notion about that some of the War Party are friends of the Israeli Likud, which happens to be true, but I haven’t heard any serious war opponent argue that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are puppets of the hapless Bibi Netanyahu, and that’s why they started a war in Iraq and then screwed it up.

The real argument is about the national interest, which includes the question of whether our alliance with Israel is too close (it is, in my view), something Israel’s supporters often find easier to meet with charges about antisemitism than on the merits. It is unfortunate in this climate that a Buchanan indulges in snark about the “amen corner”, Justice Ginsburg and the nonexistent Brandeis football team, because it helps dye this herring red.

In the very first of these
(http://www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/buchanan.html),
we learn, for example, that Buchanan has demonstrated an unhealthy interest in the question of whether diesel exhaust as used at Treblinka could really have been effective in killing Jews, as claimed by historians; that he is credited with penning Ronald Reagan’s line that dead SS troops
were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration
camps”; and that his 1996 campaign website for a time alleged
that Hillary Clinton was a Mossad spy. A little further down the results page
(http://www.realchange.org/buchanan.htm), we find in a 1996 article that
“William F. Buckley, Joshua Muravchik (a scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute) and William Safire (Pat’s fellow
speech writer on the Nixon staff) have all concluded that
Buchanan showed consistent (if carefully worded) hostility
toward Jews throughout his public statements.” Safire believed
that “Buchanan is an extremist whose anti-Semitism would rank
at level four or five — on a scale that has Adolf Hitler at 10 and
Black Muslim leader Rev. Louis Farrakhan as a seven.” And
“William F. Buckley reluctantly concluded that Buchanan was
an anti-Semite after carefully reviewing dozens of his statements
about Jews in a very long National Review article.” The same
article also notes that “when [Buchanan] attacks the Supreme
Court, he always names ‘Ruth (pause) Bader (pause) Ginsburg’,
though she is the newest and least influential member. When he
attacks Wall Street investment firms, he always names Goldman
Sachs, the only major Jewish-run firm in a WASP dominated
industry.” It seems that Buchanan has also prominently
defended a number of accused Nazi war criminals in the United
States. This article also has an extensive discussion of
Buchanan’s Holocaust revisionism, followed by one of
Buchanan’s habit of hiring as “trusted staff members” people
with ties to anti-semitic white supremacists such as David Duke.

In light of this kind of material, it will not do simply to shrug off
allegations of anti-Semitism on the Right. To do so makes you
look naive at best. The reputation of the paleoconservative
Right for harboring anti-Semitism is, I imagine, extremely
damaging for paleoconservativism, which might otherwise be
able to attract support from disaffected old-style liberals. To
dismiss such reasonable concerns out of hand, as you do here,
serves to aggravate this problem.