A scary trip to Pat Buchanan's Brain

Pat Buchanan has been on a roll for the past few weeks. Rolling exactly where, I leave that to you to decide.

First, there's Pat's bitter lament for an America that seems to be fading away. Ordinarily I'd just make a a "Leave it to Beaver" joke and move on, but there's a weird racial overtone here that frankly creeps me out a bit:

In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world's population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.
More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth – a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany – will vanish by 2060.
The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.

Ok... And? Should we try to build a reservation?

Arabic peoples, 94 million at the birth of Israel in 1948, outnumbered seven to one by Europeans, will rise to 743 million in 2060, a tenfold increase, and will be 75 percent of the white population.

Wait, first you're differentiating Arabs from Whites, now you're saying they'll be statistically included? Doesn't that throw off your earlier numbers?

Fleshing out the NPI picture is the U.N. population survey of mid-2007 that points to the 21st century disappearance of Western Man.

Western Man? You make it sound like White people are their own damn genus, Pat!

By 2050, a fourth of all the people of Eastern Europe will have vanished. Ukraine will lose one-third of its population. Russia, 150 million at the breakup of the Soviet Union, 142 million today, will be down to 108 million. Such losses dwarf what Hitler and Stalin together did to these countries.

But of course, since NOT HAVING children is not the same as someone actively KILLING someone (abortion issue aside), it would take a major bonehead to conflate a decrease in birthrate and a loss of theoretical, nonexistent people with actual GENOCIDE.

CIA Director Michael Hayden said this week that Russia will have to import workers from the Caucasus, Central Asia and China, exacerbating already serious racial and religious tensions in a nation with thousands of nuclear weapons.

With Russians east of the Urals outnumbered 100 to one by the Chinese, there is little doubt who will control the oil, gas, gold and timber of Siberia and be staring hungrily across the Bering Strait at Alaska.

And of course, White Americans have never had any problems with other countries populated by White people.

By 2050, Iran's population will have risen from today's 71 million to 100 million. Pakistan will add 84 million to reach almost 300 million, the U.S. population today. Afghanistan's population will triple from 27 million to 79 million. Iraq's will go from 29 million to 62 million. The destinies of these nations will be beyond the capacity of an aging, dwindling, dying West to dictate.

We can't control other countries' destinies? Noooo! How we will feel important and relevant? We can't become another Norway!

Western Europe's populations are being sustained by immigrants from the Maghreb and Middle East, Asia and Africa – and the baby boom among these black and brown peoples is lifting and changing the face of the Old Continent forever. Islam is returning to Iberia, Italy and the Balkans. The Third World is coming to colonize the mother countries.

Thereby, of course, turning the whole idea of "Third World" vs. "First World" on its head. And I'm not so sure that your "colonies coming home" model is really all that accurate, Pat. When was Turkey a colony of Germany, for instance?

According to the Pew Research Center, the Hispanic population of the United States will triple to 127 million by 2050, as Mexico's population grows to 130 million. An erasure of the U.S. border, or merger of the two countries, or the linguistic, cultural and social annexation of the American Southwest by Mexico appears fated.

Why? Why does exchange have to be synonymous with annexation?

Yet, last October, in another Pew poll of 45,000 people in 47 countries, a majority in 46 expressed fear of a loss of their traditional culture.

In which case they should proactively do something to preserve their culture and make it attractive and appealing, as opposed to only focusing on newcomers as problems. Make new immigrants want to be a part of the culture of the country, instead of making everything into a damn color war.

Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.

Let's hope, given that we were oftentimes a bunch of bastards. Hey, you don't suppose now would be a good time to try to build some goodwill with them, do you? Nah.

But it gets better. White people's birthrates aren't the only ones that make Pat all a twitter. He's also worried about his good friends the Jews.

Israel became home to the largest Jewish population on earth in part because American Jews in the 1990s fell in number from 5.5 million to 5.2 million, a loss of 300,000, or 6 percent of the U.S. Jewish population.

According to Charles Krauthammer, by 2050, the U.S. Jewish population will have shrunk another 50 percent to 2.5 million. American Jews are slowly vanishing. How and why is this happening? 

It is the collective decision of American Jews themselves, who have led the battles for birth control and a woman's right to choose.

Those principled bastards! Stop lobbying and jump in the sack! And then visit the doctor to get some in vitro. (Actually, that could solve most of the demographic problems Pat mentions...)

Incidentally, I really like the presumption that having a political position on something all but guarantees that you will be chomping at the bit to exercise that right or privilege. Observe, if you will, the myriad of male abortions performed every year, or how every supporter of the GI Bill is about to enlist.

As Jews were roughly 2 percent of the U.S. population from Roe v. Wade to today, perhaps 2 percent of the 50 million legal abortions since Roe were likely performed on Jewish girls or women, resulting in 1 million lost members of the Jewish community in 35 years.

Among other problems, this presumes that the Jewish population numbers were consistently remaining stable, particularly tricky and dicey because you have to self-identify as Jewish in order to be counted within Jewish population studies. From a demographic perspective, a Jew having a large family and raising them Hindu is the same as a Jew having a bunch of abortions. Given that the trend of the past half-century has been a dramatic intermarriage rate, it seems downright silly to attribute a lack of growth to abortion alone. It also assumes that the women who had abortions (many of whom were likely on the liberal side of the spectrum) would otherwise have raised their children to self-identify as Jewish, and that this would have been perpetuated through at least another generation- another major gaffe.

Then again, it's really just another example that not knowing what he's talking about has never stopped Pat Buchanan from opening his mouth.

We end our trip down painful memory road with Pat's analysis of the recent court decision in California declaring that banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Pat, master of the understatement, says this is proof we are living in a post-Christian era.

there may be hugging around the newsroom at the Times, where one senior writer said, a few years back, three-fourths of the folks who make up the front page are gay. But this is just another streetlight on America's darkening path to perdition as a society and republic.
To declare that homosexuals can marry is patently absurd. The very definition of marriage is the union of a man and woman, first and foremost, for the procreation of children.

REALLY now? Then how come you're married but have no kids, Pat? Should we say your marriage is absurd? What's that? Oh, you're an exception. How nice for you.

To say two men who live together and engage in sex can be married renders the idea and ideal of marriage meaningless.

Why? Where does the original meaning come from in the first place? Using whose criteria?

"What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder," Christ taught. Through the Old Testament and into the epistles of St. Paul, homosexual sodomy is an abomination leading to personal destruction and damnation, one of the five sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance. How, then, can four judges declare it to be integral to the sacrament of marriage?
Well, we don't believe all that rot, comes the reply.

Especially those of us who aren't Christian, don't have sacraments, and don't have specific sins that cry for vengeance.

Fine, but Christianity is the cornerstone of Western Civilization.

Bull.

Since the fall of Rome to our own time, nations have believed and acted on the belief that marriage and traditional families are the cinderblocks on which a society must be built. When these cinderblocks crumble, the society collapses. The truth has been born out in our own time.

They believed a whole lot of other crap, too- and acted on it. Racial superiority, the divine right of kings, and the subjugation of women come to mind. (Also: "cinderblocks" of society? Ow.)

Homosexual marriage is not in the California Constitution, or someone would have discovered it in 160 years. Where, then, did the state Supreme Court find this was a right?Four of seven justices unearthed this right by consulting what Orwell called their "smelly little orthodoxies."

Check your notes, Pat. Three of the four justices who voted in favor are moderate Republicans, appointed by Republicans. Exactly which orthodoxy is that?

They then decided to overturn the expressed will of the voters, declare their opinion law and order the state of California to begin recognizing homosexual unions as marriages. And they did it because they know the Times types will hail them as the newest Earl Warrens.

Um, actually, it probably has more to do with the Court's reputation as being one of the most closely-followed and influential district courts in the country, and they know that their opinion will have impacts in other places.

Not long ago, a governor of California would have laughed at the court and told the justices to go surfing, and ordered state officials not to issue the marriage licenses. The voters would have put the names of the four justices on the ballot in November and thrown them off the court, as they did Chief Justice Rose Bird a generation ago.

A regional stereotype joke, there's an old classic. But really, Surfing? That's just stupid. Here's another fact check, Pat: all three of those Republican justices have been there for at least fourteen years; one has been there for almost twenty and has been retained by the voters three times. These are hardly slack-jawed beach bums.

Thus concludes our visit to the dark continent of Pat's brain. I hope you all got your shots.