Pat Buchanan asks, "Is the Republican establishment losing it?"

Is the Republican establishment losing it?

Is the party leadership capable of uniting a governing coalition as Richard Nixon did before Watergate and Ronald Reagan resurrected in the 1980s?

Observing the hysteria and nastiness of Karl Rove and the GOP establishment at the stunning triumph of Tea Party Princess Christine O'Donnell, the answer is no.

This party is not ready to rule.

Consider. In its grand strategy to recapture a Senate that George W. Bush and Rove lost in 2006, the GOP Senate leadership endorsed all its own caucus members for re-election, if they chose to run, then picked out all its favorite candidates for the open and Democratic seats.

Conservatives and tea party activists, however, had other ideas. They began to pick their own candidates. And, again and again, the Senate's chosen were rejected in favor of tea party challengers who had the endorsement of Sarah Palin or South Carolina's Jim DeMint.

Arlen Specter was rejected by the Pennsylvania GOP and left the party. Rand Paul routed Sen. Mitch McConnell's man in Kentucky. Charlie Crist was challenged by Marco Rubio in Florida. Crist, too, departed. Sen. Bob Bennett was denied renomination in Utah. Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost her primary in Alaska to a little-known fellow named Joe Miller.

But Delaware was the stunner. Rep. Mike Castle, a former two-term governor who had been winning elections for 40 years, was a certain victor in November.

Challenger O'Donnell, however, ended all that.

Yet, though her conservative credentials are far superior to those of Castle, O'Donnell was made the object of a wilding attack by National Review and The Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer, who lashed out at Palin and DeMint for "irresponsbility," and Rove, who on Sean Hannity's show went postal as soon as the returns came in.

Now, on paper, O'Donnell is a far tougher sell in Delaware than is Castle. But her defeat is not certain. Not in this volatile year.

And what is the justification for the savagery of the attacks on her, from her own?

My take:

To answer Pat's question, it isn't just the ruling class Republicans who are unnerved by Christine O'Donnell's capture of the Senate nomination in Delaware. The ruling class political alchemists, such as Karl Rove, are in the same predicament.

What's the predicament? Furious that the federal government grows bigger, more powerful and more voracious through one presidency after another, grass roots voters rallied to the insurgent Tea Party and challenged party-anointed candidates, as Buchanan notes.

If this continues, political passion will replace the slicing and dicing that the well-paid Rove types practice for a living.

Journalists in Washington, especially, rely on the slicers and dicers for leaks, tips and advance word on new polls and findings of interest to news consumers who follow politics closely. In other words, other livelihoods also are at risk if the slicers and dicers lose their central place in the candidate selection and election process. 

The result is an all-out assault against Christine O'Donnell, whose smiling face represents a significant new threat to the slicers and dicers and their media allies.

Pat Buchanan: Was the Iraq venture worth the cost?

...as 90 months of war in Iraq come to an end for America, what was won? And what was lost?

To stampede us into war, the neocons told us that Saddam was tied to al Qaeda and had a role in 9/11, that he had VX gas, botulism, mustard gas, sarin and anthrax, and was acquiring nuclear weapons. What further proof must you have, demanded Condi Rice, "a mushroom cloud over an American city"?

The truth. Saddam had no tie to al Qaeda, no role in 9/11, no chemical weapons, no biological weapons, no nuclear program.

We attacked a nation that did not attack us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us -- to strip it of weapons it did not have.

We were misled. We were deceived. We were lied to.

The cost: 4,400 dead, 35,000 wounded, $700 billion sunk.

"Much has changed since that night" we marched into Iraq, said President Obama. "A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency. Terrorism and sectarian warfare threatened to tear Iraq apart. Thousands of Americans gave their lives. Tens of thousands have been wounded. Our relations abroad were strained. Our unity at home was tested."

Estimates of Iraqi war dead run from 70,000 to 100,000, which means hundreds of thousands of Iraqi widows and orphans. Christians have seen priests murdered, churches burned and half their number driven into exile. Four million Iraqis have left or lost their homes. Two million are in exile, as Baghdad has been cleansed of Sunnis. Al Qaeda was not in Iraq under Saddam. It is there now.

"Time to turn the page," said President Obama.

How does Iraq turn the page, as we retreat to secure bases and prepare to bring home the last 50,000 troops?

Terrorism has returned. Iraq's casualties are back up to where they were before the U.S. surge. Electricity is off much of the time. Six months after elections, no government exists. The Iraqi dead, wounded, widowed, orphaned, homeless and exiled are surely not better off.

What about those we leave behind? What happens to Iraqis who worked with us when we leave? How did our Vietnamese friends fare? What kind of future will Iraqis have, if civil and sectarian war return?

That our soldiers, Marines, diplomats and aid workers did their jobs bravely and honorably is understood by their countrymen -- and attested to by the fact the U.S. military is the most respected of our institutions.

But was the war worth it? Some 72 percent of Americans said in a recent CBS poll that it was not worth the price in U.S. war dead.

What does the secretary of defense think?

"It really requires a historian's perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run," says Robert Gates. "How it all weighs in the balance over time remains to be seen." A seven-year war, and our minister of defense cannot declare that it was all worth it.

Some legal immigrants displace American workers; why not enact a recession moratorium?

There are dozens of reasons to oppose mass immigration. But with 14.8 million Americans unemployed as of January and another 10.4 million working part-time involuntarily or too discouraged to look for work, and with President Obama calling jobs the Number One issue, the displacement of American workers by immigrants jumps out.

There are currently eight million illegal aliens in the workforce, and the federal government issues 1.5 million work visas every year. Dealing with these two issues would immediately solve the unemployment problem.

The two obvious steps are:
cracking down on illegal immigration
issuing a moratorium on work visas

A few Republicans are speaking out about the effect illegal immigration has on workers. But no one in Washington is talking about legal immigration.

Numbers USA along with a few prominent commentators such as Pat Buchanan, Bay Buchanan, and former Congressmen Virgil Goode and Tom Tancredo have called for a moratorium. But there’s barely been a peep inside the beltway.

Buchanan: "...the state they are coming to detest is at war with the country that they still love"

What called the Tea Party into existence?

Some are angry over unchecked immigration and the failure to control our borders and send the illegals back. Some are angry over the loss of manufacturing jobs. Some are angry over winless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some are angry over ethnic preferences they see as favoring minorities over them.

What they agree upon, however, is that they have been treading water for a decade, working harder and harder with little or no improvement in their family standard of living. They see the government as taking more of their income in taxes, seeking more control over their institutions, creating entitlements for others not them, plunging the nation into unpayable debt, inviting inflation or a default that can wipe out what they have saved.

And there is nothing they can do about it, for they are politically powerless. By their gatherings, numbers, mockery of elites and militancy, however, they get a sense of the power that they do not have.

Their repeated reappearance on the national stage, in new incarnations, should be a fire bell in the night to the establishment of both parties. For it testifies to their belief and that of millions more that the state they are coming to detest is at war with the country that they still love.

How has the war in Afghanistan made U.S. safer?

How has occupying two nations at a cost of 5,000 dead, 35,000 wounded and a trillion dollars made us safer from an enemy that more resembles the Apache of Geronimo than the panzers of Rommel?

If protection of the homeland against another Sept. 11 is the goal of this war, how relevant to that goal is the building of clinics and schools in Kabul and keeping the Taliban at bay in Helmand?

Are we fighting other people's wars, rather than our own war?

We Americans are today widely hated in the Arab and Islamic world by scores of millions, out of whom al Qaeda need but recruit a few hundred suicide bombers to wreak havoc on our country.

Does having 200,000 U.S. troops in their part of the world, fighting and killing Muslims, make our country more secure than defending our borders, keeping radicals out, running al Qaeda down, and tracking and killing them where they are?

To win the war we are in, we have to fight the war we are in, not the war we prefer to fight because no one else is so good at it.

U.S. mission in Afghanistan creeps and creeps

"Though U.S. force levels are higher than ever, the U.S. military situation is worse than ever. Though President Karzai is expected to win re-election, he is regarded as the ineffectual head of a corrupt regime. Though we have trained an Afghan army and police force of 220,000, twice that number are now needed. The Taliban are operating not only in the east, but in the north and west, and are taking control of the capital of the south, Kandahar."

(snip)

"Had we gone into Afghanistan in 2001, knocked over the Taliban, driven out al-Qaida and departed, we would not be facing what we do today.

But we were seduced by the prospect of converting a backward tribal nation of 25 million, which has resisted every empire to set foot on its inhospitable soil, into a shining new democracy that would be a model for the Islamic world.

Now, whatever Obama decides, we shall pay a hellish price for the hubris of the nation-builders."