'Learning to Love Pat Buchanan'

That's what some on the alt-weekly Left are grappling with, in response to Pitchfork Pat's new neo-con bash. Which reminds me of the morning after Election Night 2000, when Buchanan and Ralph Nader met warmly at the National Press Club, and some giant Green Party lunatic started chanting "Shoulder to shoulder on trade!!" Also makes timely this morning's Margaret Carlson op-ed in the L.A. Times, about the value (and usefulness) of political "turncoats."

Buchanan's making a lot of noise on his book tour, and continuing his American history seminar over at WorldNet Daily, including this fond look back at the isolationist 1930s.

For 20 years, Americans felt we had been had by the Brits and had been suckered into war "only to pull England's chestnuts out of the fire." This sentiment fueled the greatest of all anti-war movements in U.S. history, America First.

The achievements of that organization are monumental. By keeping America out of World War II until Hitler attacked Stalin in June of 1941, Soviet Russia, not America, bore the brunt of the fighting, bleeding and dying to defeat Nazi Germany. Thanks to America First, no nation suffered less in the world's worst war.

Pearl Harbor, which FDR cynically provoked after assuring Americans he was doing his best to keep us out of war, finished the America First movement.

Buchanan's also being quoted in lengthy Dar Al Hayat neo-con dot-connectors, and roasted over an open satire at Jewsweek.