Pat Buchanan has returned, offering his 12th book: the well-written The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority. Slightly painful as it is to confess, I admire Buchanan. Not for his flippant deriding of gays as "sodomites" or spouting that AIDS was nature's "awful retribution" for homosexual behavior. Not for his feeding the devious appetites of Nixon, whether guiding his master along airport rope lines or putting words in his mouth as a speechwriter. Not for his views that "secular humanists" have succeeded in "de-Christianizing" America. Not for his brackish belief that "immigrant invasions imperil our country and civilization."
I'm willing to gulp and let all that and more pass. Suavity is not one his strengths. Besides, who doesn't have a bad day now and again, or, in Pat's case, a bad decade or two? Compensating for his negatives are two positives: comedic bents that let him laugh at himself and the persistence of staying in the ring -- taking and giving uppercuts and rising after knockdowns.
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