Pat Buchanan, I won't forget this: "What Does America Offer the World?"

Pat Buchanan, noted anti-Semite, and MSNBC's pet punching bag in lieu of a real Republican, wrote an editorial for Arab News not long ago. This got no coverage in the American media. When Pat is propped up on every news show as an American "conservative Republican" against the Iraq war (now reconstruction and stabilization), please keep this editorial in mind.

Pat Buchanan favors Iranian theocracy over American democracy. But don't take my word for it:

http://arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=45722&d=27&m=5&y=2004

"If conservatives reject the “equality” preached by Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, NARAL and the National Organization for Women, why seek to impose it on the Islamic world? Why not stand beside Islam, and against Hollywood and Hillary?

In June 2002 at West Point, President Bush said, “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time and in every place.”

But even John Kerry does not agree with George Bush on the morality of homosexual unions and stem cell research. On such issues, conservative Americans have more in common with devout Muslims than with liberal Democrats.

The president notwithstanding, Americans no longer agree on what is moral truth. For as someone said a few years back, there is a cultural war going on in this country, a religious war. It is about who we are, what we believe and what we stand for as a people.

What some of us view as the moral descent of a great and Godly republic into imperial decadence, neocons see as their big chance to rule the world. In Georgia recently, the president declared to great applause: “I can’t tell you how proud I am of our commitment to values. ... That commitment to values is going to be an integral part of our foreign policy as we move forward. These aren’t American values, these are universal values. Values that speak universal truths.”

But what universal values is he talking about? If he intends to impose the values of MTV America on the Muslim world in the name of a “world democratic revolution,” he will provoke and incite a war of civilizations America cannot win because Americans do not want to fight it. This may be the neocons’ war. It is not our war.

When Bush speaks of freedom as God’s gift to humanity, does he mean the First Amendment freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses, a book considered blasphemous to the Islamic faith? If the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom, why is it our duty to change their thinking? Why are they wrong? When the president speaks of freedom, does he mean the First Amendment prohibition against our children reading the Bible and being taught the Ten Commandments in school?

If the president wishes to fight a moral crusade, he should know the enemy is inside the gates. The great moral and cultural threats to our civilization come not from outside America, but from within. We have met the enemy, and he is us. The war for the soul of America is not going to be lost or won in Fallujah. Unfortunately, Pagan America of 2004 has far less to offer the world in cultural fare than did Christian America of 1954. Many of the movies, books, magazines, TV shows, videos and much of the music we export to the world are as poisonous as the narcotics the Royal Navy forced on the Chinese people in the Opium Wars."