I've got to say it. I shall miss Pat Buchanan from MSNBC's airwaves.
Was Buchanan most of the contemptible things his critics charged? Almost to a tee. There's no way around that. He was also one of the few, hardcore ideologues-as-political-commentator who could step back from his own delusions (Sarah Palin was his one true blind spot) and offer up some of the keenest, most incisive analysis of the national scene to be heard anywhere.
One doesn't rise to the highest levels of Machiavellian-Nixonian politics by being a Howdy Doody candyass about one's own vulnerabilities and the opposition's grit; Buchanan, accordingly, could, and often did, surgically skewer the right's and praise the left's evolving tactics and strategies, just as a conscientious, battlefield general would openly acknowledge his own troops' weaknesses and the enemy's strengths. It's what Buchanan got paid by MSNBC to do, and he did it well -- indeed, far better than any of the network's insufferably predictable, one-note cheerleaders.
The Beast's (I prefer Evelyn Waugh's original version) Howard Kurtz nailed it:
To hear Pat Buchanan tell it, he was booted off MSNBC because of a vast left-wing conspiracy.
The reality is a bit more mundane: The network moved sharply left, Buchanan’s boss felt uncomfortable with him, and he was road kill....
[His latest] book does contain some inflammatory passages about race and immigration. But Buchanan has been saying this sort of thing for three decades. He hasn’t changed, it’s MSNBC that now has Rachel Maddow anchoring on primary nights.
I suppose the loss of Buchanan's analysis would be more endurable if MSNBC had replaced this often offensive Patton with an Omar Bradley, but instead the network delivered unto us ... Michael Steele -- an "analyst" with an intolerable penchant for uttering insights such as, I think Romney is in trouble, I think Santorum is making a move on Romney, I think the sky is frequently fucking blue.
With the exception of "Hardball" and "The Last Word," MSNBC's daily rotational schedule of undifferentiated boosterism from the left and second-string banalities from the right should come with a Thorazine prescription. Every time I hear, for instance, Ed Schultz crack smugly wise about Fox News' pitiable bias, I feel an irresistible urge to pump my veins full of a nerve-deadening something. I'll give him credit for this much, though: he has vastly increased my evening reading.
Maybe I'm odd duck, but here's the thing. As an instinctive democratic socialist and by necessity passable Democrat, I'm already quite familiar with the left-leaning, Peter Finch-like angry prophets' denunciations of the hypocrisies of our time. What I want to hear -- what I need to hear -- is whatever incisive stuff the other guys are thinking. And Pat Buchanan, on MSNBC, was that lone voice. Now, even he is gone, which only further exacerbates cable networks' mindless polarization and further weakens mutual enlightenment.