By Patrick J. Buchanan

Is war with Iran inevitable, even imminent? Or is peace at hand?

From the public diplomacy of the administration, either conclusion may be reached. Consider.

“West Offers Iran ‘Refreshed’ Deal,” ran the headline in the May 3 Washington Times. The story described an offer to Iran, agreed to by all five members of the Security Council — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — of a sweetened grand bargain, if Tehran will suspend its enrichment of uranium.

Blessing the offering in London was Condi Rice.

Details will not be made public, but the offer is said to include Western aid to Iran for a civilian nuclear program, a light water reactor and a five-year stock of enriched uranium held for Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of “The Hollow Men.”

Eliot’s poem was written after the Great War of 1914-1918 had carried off 9 million soldiers, wounded twice as many more, brought down the Romanov, Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires, and ushered onto the world stage Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and, soon, Adolf Hitler.

Readers have ascribed various meanings to Eliot’s words. One college professor of English suggested Eliot was looking back to the “whimper” in the cradle in Bethlehem that signaled the end of the old world, the Pax Romana, and the coming of the new Christian age.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

If John McCain wins the presidency, his comeback — after the bankrupt debacle his campaign had become in the summer of 2007 with his backing of the amnesty bill — will be the stuff of legend.

And as nominee, he is entitled to conduct his own campaign and be cut slack by a party whose brand name is now Enron.

That said, McCain seems to have decided to win by love-bombing the Big Media and putting miles between himself and the base.

Consider his “Forgotten Places” tour of last week.

It began in Selma, Ala., where McCain went to Edmund Pettis Bridge to hail John Lewis and the marchers night-sticked and hosed down by the Alabama State Troopers on the Montgomery march for voting rights.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

As one looks at the polls, the issues and the candidates, the election of 2008 resembles what poker players call a “lay-down hand.”

Two-thirds of the nation believes the Iraq war a blunder. Sixty-nine percent disapproves of President Bush. Eighty-one percent thinks America is on the wrong course.

Inflation is at 4 percent and rising. Unemployment is 5 percent and rising. Gasoline, heating oil and food prices are soaring. The dollar has lost half its values against the euro. Homes are being foreclosed upon at Depression rates. The stock market is in a swoon. And 3.5 million manufacturing jobs have vanished under Bush.

Hillary and Obama have both raised far more than John McCain.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Last week, the Supreme Court held, 7 to 2, that Kentucky’s method of lethal injection remains a constitutional way of executing the rapist of a child. Justice John Paul Stevens concurred.

In his opinion, however, Stevens exhilarated liberals by coming out of the closet as a born-again abolitionist of capital punishment.

Said his honor, it is time to reconsider the “justification for the death penalty itself.” Court decisions and state actions that justify it are but “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable and deliberative process.”

Enlightened men and women, the justice is saying, will abolish capital punishment as a barbaric relic of a blessedly bygone era.

by Tom Piatak - Taki’s Magazine

Last week at NRO, cub reporter Stephen Spruiell announced that he had found what might be “the most deceptive ad” of the 2008 race, a Barack Obama spot blaming free trade for job losses at the Delphi plant in Warren, Ohio. According to Spruiell, the ad was deceptive because “foreign competition did not drive the company to eliminate American jobs” and “workers were offered … generous buyouts and early retirement packages.” Rather than blame foreign competition, Spruiell blamed Americans–specifically Americans belonging to labor unions–and held up as his bright, shining model Honda, which assembles cars in rural Ohio without any union. Spruiell also blamed another American, Steven Schuyler, the former Delphi employee featured in Obama’s ad, because he did not disclose in the ad that he, too, had received a buyout from Delphi and because he is “characterized by bitterness that things had to change, and rank dishonesty about why they did.”

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Iran is conducting a proxy war against the United States in Iraq, declared Ambassador Ryan Crocker last week.

How? Gen. David Petraeus explained. The Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah are arming, training and directing the Shia militia fighting U.S. and Iraqi forces in Basra and firing rockets into the Green Zone. Said Petraeus, the Quds Force is responsible for killing hundreds of American soldiers.

If true, these are acts of war from a privileged sanctuary. And Bush would be as justified in attacking these Iranian base camps as was Nixon in ordering U.S. forces to clean out the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

It was said behind closed doors to the chablis-and-brie set of San Francisco, in response to a question as to why he was not doing better in that benighted and barbarous land they call Pennsylvania.

Like Dr. Schweitzer, home from Africa to address the Royal Society on the customs of the upper Zambezi, Barack described Pennsylvanians in their native habitats of Atloona, Alquippa, Johnstown and McKeesport.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and … the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The neocons may yet get their war on Iran.

Ever since President Nouri al-Maliki ordered the attacks in Basra on the Mahdi Army, Gen. David Petraeus has been laying the predicate for U.S. air strikes on Iran and a wider war in the Middle East.

Iran, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee, has “fueled the recent violence in a particularly damaging way through its lethal support of the special groups.”

These “special groups” are “funded, trained, armed and directed by Iran’s Quds Force with help from Lebanese Hezbollah. It was these groups that launched Iranian rockets and mortar rounds at Iraq’s seat of government (the Green Zone) … causing loss of innocent life and fear in the capital.”

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Having cheerfully confessed he knows little about economics, John McCain is advancing himself as a foreign-policy president, a “realistic idealist,” he told the World Affairs Council of Los Angeles.

But judging from the content of his speech, McCain is no more a realist than he is a reflective man.

Speaking of our five-year war in Iraq, McCain declares, “It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possible genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible and premature withdrawal.”

Fair point. There is surely a great risk in a too-rapid withdrawal.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Yes, it was a good war,” writes Richard Cohen in his column challenging the thesis of pacifist Nicholson Baker in his new book, “Human Smoke,” that World War II produced more evil than good.

Baker’s compelling work, which uses press clips and quotes of Axis and Allied leaders as they plunged into the great cataclysm, is a virtual diary of the days leading up to World War II.

Riveting to this writer was that Baker uses some of the same episodes, sources and quotes as this author in my own book out in May, “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War.’”

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In echo of Warren Harding’s “A Return to Normalcy” speech of 1920, George Bush last week declared, “Normalcy is returning back to Iraq.”

The term seemed a mite ironic. For, as Bush spoke, Iraqis were dying in the hundreds in the bloodiest fighting in months in Basra, the Shia militias of Moqtada al Sadr were engaging Iraqi and U.S. troops in Sadr City, and mortar shells were dropping into the Green Zone.

One begins to understand why Gen. Petraeus wants a “pause” in the pullout of U.S. forces, and why Bush agrees. This will leave more U.S. troops in Iraq on Inauguration Day 2009, than on Election Day 2006, when the country voted the Democrats into power to bring a swift end to the war.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In his Philadelphia address on race, Sen. Obama identified as a root cause of white resentment affirmative action — the punishing of white working- and middle-class folks for sins they did not commit:

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race,” said Barack. “As far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything. … So when they … hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed … resentment builds over time.”

On this issue, Barack seemed to have nailed it.

By Pastor Chuck Baldwin
NewsWithViews.com

I think it is time that we all stood up and gave the Republican Party a big round of applause. I mean, they have done us all a huge favor. By an overwhelming majority, the GOP has prevented a potential plague from enveloping these United States of America, and I think it is time that we acknowledged it. Yes, the GOP stopped a potential catastrophe. Without the combined efforts of millions of Republicans, there is no telling what kind of disaster might have ensued. Let’s hear it for the GOP! Hip Hip Hooray!