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General Electric "News" Theater rolls on with another installment of MSGOP's Hardball program, starring Chris Mathews as a large pale oafish Beltway Bourbon sort who engages an ever rotating cast of guest-stars in bilious conversational coup de theatre.

Anyway, Mathews was at it on Monday, March 15 2004 with another episode. This one featured a rare subdued segment with good buddy and GE Theater co-star Pat Buchanan.

Pistol Pat and Chris were discussing John Kerry's anti-Viet Nam War activism and allegations of war atrocities made by Kerry those many years ago. Naturally, this conversation visits the usual intellecually vacant attempt to reduce Kerry's positions and activities following the Viet-Nam War to a simplistically framed, dumbed-down storyline, that can be easily loaded into the MSGOP projector on a moments notice and beamed across the glowing NBC/GE universe at the flick of a producers wrist.

The story essentially goes like this: John Kerry's "character" is of a questionable sort because he was critical of the war in Vietnam and of war atrocities commited by other American servicemen during that war. And - John Kerry should have kept his mouth shut about that. He's obviously implicating all Americans in such atrocities! He was obviously nothing but a misguided leftist opportunist riding the wave of the times. And blah blah blah.

MATTHEWS: Who was the man of greater character? Richard Nixon or John Kerry?
BUCHANAN: I think Nixon was a man of great personal character. I think he was a man of flaws but he hung right in there to the end.
MATTHEWS: And Kerry is a man of flaws or a man of bad character with some positives?
BUCHANAN: Well, I wish Kerry would stand up and say, that look, "I shouldn‘t have said that about these guys." He knows he shouldn‘t have said that.
MATTHEWS: Yes. I haven‘t heard him say that.
BUCHANAN: Why doesn‘t he just say it?
MATTHEWS: The idea of atrocities, and "we all participated in atrocities." I don‘t think that would sell too well right now.

You can read the rest of it here: Harball with Chris Mathews, MSNBC Monday March 15, 2004

So. This reminded me of something. Pat Buchanan, in his book A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny made considerable noise about his admiration for Charles A. Lindbergh. Buchanan identifies Lindbergh as one of his heroes. Lindbergh of course was not exactly a raving lefty. To say the least. He was famous for his nutty Des Moines 1941 harangue against cabals of Hollywood Jews and other such bugaboos stewed up by his pals in Dearborn Michigan and on Wall Street and any number of other Nordic avenger enclaves. His opposition to America's entry into WW2 is well known. While Brown Brothers Harriman and Prescott Bush's Union Banking Corporation and were busy helping Thyssen Steel construct Hitler's Luftwaffe Charles Lindbergh was busy visiting Germany on behalf of grand advances in aviation technology. Up up and away.

But what I recalled reading might interest Pat Buchanan and his MSGOP co-patriot buddy Chris Mathews. Especially as it relates to what John Kerry had to say all those years ago with respect to war atrocities. So here ya go Pat. Groove on this. From your hero Charles A. Lindbergh's own account. The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh - 1938-1945 (published 1970, excerpts first appeared in American Heritage Oct 1970. (which is where I gleaned the following excerpt.)

[Lindbergh, recounts a visit to Camp Dora, Germany, June 11, 1945 and reflects upon the horrors found there and eleswhere...]

...it is one thing to have the intellectual knowledge, even to look at photographs someone else has taken, and quite another to stand on the scene yourself, seeing, hearing, feeling with your own senses. A strange sort of disturbance entered my mind. Where was it I had felt like this before? The South Pacific? Yes; those rotting Japanese bodies in the Biak caves; the load of garbage dumped on dead soldiers in a bomb crater; the green skulls set up to decorate ready room and tents.

It seemed impossible that men-civilized men- could degenerate to such a level. Yet they had. Here at Camp Dora in Germany; there in the coral caves of Biak. But there, it was we, Americans, who had done such things, we who claimed to stand for something different. We, who claimed that the German was defiling humanity in his treatment of the Jew, were doing the same thing in our treatment of the Jap. "They really are lower than beasts. Every one of 'em ought to be exterminated." How many times had I heard that statement made by American officers in the Pacific! "And why beholdest thou the mote that is thy brother's eye but considerest not the beam that is thine own eye?"...

A long line of such incidents parades before my mind: the story of our Marines firing on unarmed Japanese survivors who swam ashore on the beach at Midway; the accounts of our machine-gunning prisoners on a Hollandia airstrip; of the Australians pushing captured Japanese soldiers out of the transport planes which were taking them south over the New Guinea mountains ("the Aussies reported them as committing hara-kiri or 'resisting'"); of the shinbones cut, for letter openers and pen trays, from newly killed Japanese bodies on Noemfoor; of the young pilot who was "going to cream that Jap hospital one of these days"; of American soldiers poking through the mouths of Japanese corpses for gold-filled teeth ("the infantry's favorite occupation"); of Jap heads buried in anthills "to get them clean for souvenirs"; of bodies bulldozed to the roadside and dumped by the hundreds into shallow, unmarked graves ("where they're so close we can't stand 'em, we have to bury 'em"); of pictures of Mussolini and his mistress hung by the feet in an Italian city, to the approval of thousands of Americans who claim to stand for high, civilized ideals. As far back as one can go in history, these atrocities have been going on, not only in Germany with its Dachaus and its Buchenwalds and its Camp Doras, but in Russia, in the Pacific, in the riotings and lynchings at home, in the less-publicized uprisings in Central and South America, the cruelties of China, a few years ago in Spain, in pogroms of the past, the burning of witches in New England, tearing people apart on the English racks, burnings at the stake for the benefit of Christ and God.

I look down at the pit of ashes ("twenty-five thousand in a year and a half"). This, I realize, is not a thing confined to any nation or people...What is barbaric on one side of the earth is still barbaric on the other. "Judge not that ye be not judged." It is not the Germans alone, or the Japs, but the men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation...

[source: American Heritage, October 1970. vol. xxi no. 6 - page 115]

I wonder if Pat Buchanan believes that his hero should have apologized for his statements implicating American soldiers in what Mathews calls "the idea of atrocities"?

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