Matt Yglesias

The Old Right

Present-day conservatism is obsessed with killing Muslims, which has put it in alliance with Israeli nationalism in a way that’s at odds with the American right’s traditional anti-semitism. But after promising to balance the budget by eliminating aid to Israel it seems that the McCain campaign has been looking for other ways to get back in touch with these kind of roots. In particular, in her introductory speech Sarah Palin quoted an oldtime conservative populist named Westbrook Pegler. She didn’t, however, use his name, presumably because whoever dug the quote up for her knew who the source was and knew that the source was disreputable. Ben Smith explains:

It’s an odd source because Pegler, who moved further right as his career went on, ended up very, very far out. Frank notes that he talked hopefully of the assassination of Franklin Roosevelt.

He was also known for what Philip Roth described as his “casual distaste for Jews,” which had become so evident by the end that he was bounced from the journal of the John Birch Society in 1964 for alleged anti-semitism. According to his obituary, he’d advanced the theory that American Jews of Eastern European descent were “instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared.”

According to Smith the likely source of the quote was a 1990 Pat Buchanan book that seems to be the only easily available online source.

Worst President Ever

Is George W. Bush the worst President ever? New polling looks at the issue: “41% said he would go down in history as the worst, the survey of 1,000 people reported. (The poll did not report on the competition for that title among the president’s predecessors).”

The good news for Bush’s reputation is that fully half the population says he’s not the worst. And I think I’ll have to throw in with the “not worst” camp. Conventional wisdom has traditionally put James Buchanan at the bottom of the rankings, and I think it still holds up — nothing Bush has don’t has really tended toward plunging the country into destructive civil war nor has his policy agenda included anything as reprehensible as efforts to defend people’s rights to own other human beings. Buchanan is tough competition and I don’t think anyone will be beating him for some time.