Right Guy, Wrong Choir

W. James Antle, an editor at the American Spectator, takes a measured view of Nixon hand Pat Buchanan's firing by MSNBC:

The casus belli of Buchanan's ouster was his most recent book, Suicide of a Superpower. It contains ideas, MSNBC president Phil Griffin told reporters, unfit for "national dialogue, much less on MSNBC."

Remaining on the network is Al Sharpton, whose denunciations of "white interlopers" and "diamond merchants" helped provoke violence against Freddy's Fashion Mart and the Jewish communities of Crown Heights. You will search Buchanan's oeuvre in vain for anything approaching Sharpton at his most hateful.

Many of the demographic claims made in Buchanan's book aren't particularly controversial. He borrowed the chapter titles about the end of Christian America and white America from cover stories in Newsweek and the Atlantic, respectively. His tone is generally wistful, not angry. His thesis is less that diversity is inherently undesirable than that it is difficult to manage without other bonds, values, or experiences that bring countrymen together.

Buchanan hasn't always succeeded in bringing his countrymen together either, often using words that wound people of colors and creeds who don't feel welcome in his vision of America. Despite that real shortcoming, he is a patriot who has consistently believed that his views are open to debate. Do his critics?

Not in the jungle of contemporary cable news, which has evolved from CNN's bold experiment in 24-hour TV journalism into a throwback to 19th century partisan broadsheets. To my knowledge, since Alan Colmes bailed a few years ago, Fox News hasn't had a liberal or progressive of Buchanan's stature appearing regularly. It may well be that MSNBC decided it shouldn't keep wearing Pat as a fair-and-balanced fig leaf if the other side didn't present compensatory foliage -- and that's what Fox and MSNBC are all about, Republicans vs. Democrats, tit for tat, in both cases ideology vs. substance. You don't even need to watch, because you usually know what they're going to say already. They're both streaming to the choir.

In short, Fox News' viewers don't want to watch a liberal, and MSNBC's don't want to listen to a conservative -- and even when it comes to TV news, as in any other market, what the customer wants, the customer gets.

Did Illness Bear Her Heart Away?

In the March "American Spectator," a review by Algis Valiunas of Brad Gooch's new biography of Flannery O'Connor (now on my Kindle for a few bucks less than the print-is-dead version). The cheerful, thoughtful, conventional Christian orthodoxy of her letters always seemed to conflict with the darkness in her fiction, especially the novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. I always thought I just wasn't subtle enough. But Valiunas and Gooch note it, too. Perhaps it was the struggle against chronic, wasting disease (she was diagnosed with lupus as a young woman) and the specter of mortality. Valiunas:

Gooch lays out the evidence from O'Connor's letters and essays for her belief that [deeply troubled novel protagonists] Motes and Tarwater were truly touched by God, but he also cites the opinion of the novelist John Hawkes, a friend and correspondent of O'Connor's, "that hers was a 'black,' even 'diabolical,' authorial voice." O'Connor assured Hawkes it wasn't so, but, dubious as it may be to question the word of a virtual saint, the books appear lit by a fire from below that bespeaks not the terrible speed of mercy but the terrible slowness with which the tormented soul is consumed. O'Connor died at 39. To judge from her fiction, she had likely had all she could take.

Nixonian Spectator

Is the "American Spectator," long a skeptic about Sin0-U.S. ties, mellowing? George H. Whittman sticks up for the delicate U.S.-PRC-Taiwan balancing act that grew out of President Nixon's Beijing breakthrough. Maybe it's the $1 trillion in Treasuries China holds:

[In Taiwan. the] United States has retained a valuable ally in a key geo-strategic part of the world. Taiwan may lack broad diplomatic recognition but nonetheless plays an important economic -- and thus political -- role internationally. And the PRC has been able to maintain its claim of sovereignty over this large island that it never conquered, while at the same time having the advantage of trade and investment.

Warning: A Blog About Monetary Policy

Richard Nixon was politically crucified on the cross of the gold standard, argue Stephen Moore and John Tamny in the "American Spectator":

With the real economy weakening due to rising inflation, Nixon’s approval ratings tanked, which allowed the relatively minor scandal of Watergate to force his resignation. Some years after he left office, Nixon told a group of friends and advisors that the policy decision he regretted most was taking America off the gold standard, and that had he not done that, he could have withstood the Watergate scandal.