Sunday, March 12: The week just before Pat will begin to resurface. Much anticipation, because after nearly two months of silence "in winter quarters" as Pat described it in Meet the Press this morning, the polls are low. After this morning with Russert, he will do the Today Show and speak at Harvard on Thursday, later this month at the conference put on by the incomparable http://www.antiwar.com/ in San Francisco, and a lot of other stuff.
First thing on Monday, I sent a letter to the editor to the NY Daily News—correcting some factual inventions put forth by one of their columnists. I've noticed that the real hard core of anti-Buchanan columnists have apparently discovered that most Americans don't think someone ought to be banned from public life if they opposed the Gulf War or objected to the imprisonment of innocent people on false war crime charges. No matter how many times they point out in shock and horror that Pat Buchanan once referred to the "Amen Corner" on TV, most folks are unfazed. The solution: make up Buchanan quotes and then attack them! Last week it was the New York Daily News's Lenore Skenazy. I sent the following letter to the editor, which the News has yet to run:
"Lenore Skenazy may not like Pat Buchanan, but has no right to attribute words to him he didn't say. She claims in her March 1 column that Buchanan "called black people Zulus." Maybe she was thinking of Buchanan's remark –which drove the politically correct into a frenzy —that one million Englishmen could be more easily assimilated into the state of Virginia than one million Zulus. Or perhaps she was confused by memories of former Daily News columnist Ed Koch calling Congressman Ron Dellums "a Zulu warrior"— a comment which also occasioned much manufactured outrage. But as for Pat calling black people Zulus — it just never happened. And regarding Buchanan's alleged proposal to deport non-Europeans, I have no clue how she dreamed that one up; perhaps it is also a product of her lively imagination.
Scott McConnell
Senior Policy Advisor
BuchananReform"
I was a New York Post columnist for years, and would have been mortified if I had made a factual error like that. I would have been genuinely embarrassed before my boss and friend Eric Briendel, to have written such lazy invented and false stuff into a column. Breindel might not have said much in direct rebuke, but certainly he would have lost all respect. I wonder whether the folks at the News care, or if they simply feel if you are politically correct and take the liberal establishment line, normal standards don't apply. Perhaps a desire from Mort Zuckerman on down to have an election where no serious issues are engaged is so intense that when it comes to Buchanan, anything goes.
