Where the Right Went Wrong by Patrick J. Buchanan

You have only to look around today in our country and see how very broken our country has become under *now former* President George W. Bush. How did the Republicans, the party of small government and the balanced budget, become spendthrift hogs who never met a Pork barrel they wouldn't chow down on like real pigs at the feeding trough and become people whose idea of a solution to any problem is to throw money at it?

And what, exactly, led to this disastrous war in Iraq, when the country we invaded had nothing to do with 9/11 and no "weapons of mass destruction"?

Buchanan starts out with discussing our country and how we have passed being an "Empire at Apogee" and come to where we are today, and where we are likely to go from here. Though the book was published in 2004, I will have to say that Buchanan saw our current economic crisis coming, though not precisely the reason for it, and why our failure would cause similar problems around the world, like a chain of dominoes falling.

He then moves on to how we became an empire amd how we did so, eventually moving on to the middle east and the current war that we are fighting there, and how it happened. He then gives ideas for what he believes is wrong with our country and how to fix it, which boils down to strengthening Congress over the other two branches of government and limiting the power of "Activist Judges".

Well, you may not know it from this blog so far, but I'm pretty well a liberal on social issues, but conservative elsewhere. But where I am liberal, I am *really* liberal. But I don't just read people I agree with and who agree with me. I try to listen to all sides, even if I don't agree with them. So, I agreed with Pat on what at least some of the problems of our nation are these days, but not so much on others.

I agree with his dismal predictions about the Nation's financial future, given how we are living them right now. He was definitely right about that one. Who could argue it?

And I agree with much of what he said on the Middle East, why we are stuck in this war, and that former President G.W. Bush lied like a wall-to-wall rug when he talked about how he'd govern before he was elected, judging by his words and actions afterwards. But Buchanan wants to put all the blame on the NeoConservatives, who he says are really liberals masquerading as Conservatives, which made me think of the "No True (Fill in the Blank)" Fallacy. Just because he disagrees with them doesn't make them not Conservatives or Republicans, another charge he tries to lay on them. Republican does not equal Conservative.

To bring our country back, he advocates returning to the way Reagan ran the government, but he misquotes Reagan when he says that "Government is the Problem", because Reagan was talking about a specific case, and said "Government is the Problem in this instance". Secondly, quite a lot of Reagan's policies weren't the best. Trickle down Economics? Even his Vice-President said flatly that Trickle Down Economics was "Voodoo Economics" and "Never Worked". So, while Pat and a lot of other conservatives may hold up Reagan as some Natural Presidential Godsend, I don't see any halos on top of his head. He completely ignored the AIDS crisis, in another case, and whether or not you believe it was God's Plague on icky, slutty gays, the health consequences of that were horrible and long-felt.

Other items Pat blames for the mess include Congress, which he feels should be able to overrule the Supreme Court and "activist Judges" by ignoring the rulings of the S.C. when they feel like it (well, there goes that system of checks and balances our Founding Fathers left us with!) and hits the well known Conservative Straw-men of "The Gay Marriage Agenda" and basically says that America should never have integrated Blacks and Whites, all of which left a very bad taste in my mouth indeed.

I wouldn't recommend this book at all. Reading it may make some Republicans feel better about why the country is in such bad shape, but I think Buchanan would scream with our current Democrat-led Congress if some of the changes he suggests implementing were actually put in place. Imagine if Congress passed a law supporting Equal marriage with heterosexuals and homosexuals, and told the Supreme Court they could never change that? He suggested Congress do so after passing a "Defense of Marriage Act". I think his ideas are not well-thought out, and I don't think many of them pass the smell test. Give this one a pass.