I read a thing on him on Buzzflash today, and he was truly nuts. He tried to assassinate FDR. I mean c'mon, check out the loser with no friends, sounds like KKarl.

And of course he's crazy Uncle Pat's hero.

I swear, if there's anything I give Rachel credit for, it's for being able to be within arm's reach of that man and NOT strangle him.

She is the picture of restraint.

No doubt, I wish I could've linked to the article, but don't know how yet, I'm working on it. He was against the Jews and helped Hitler from what I understand, and so, by proxy, he's a friend of Prescott Bush. Hmmm....

Well of course he is.

Nazi bastard.

I can see why Pitchfork Pat Buchanan and Caribou Barbie, his lovely little brigadier, like Westbrook Pegler so much.

http://www.slate.com/id/2096673/

Students of history, however, may come to a different conclusion. Since Buckley floats a defense of Pegler while burying the charges against him, let us be clear about who this man was and what he represented. Pegler's career took off in 1933 when he became a nationally syndicated columnist with Scripps-Howard, roared along under the Hearst family, and ended 30 years later under the auspices of a twitchy sect of neo-Nazis and professional racists from the White Citizens Council and the Rev. Billy James Hargis' truly reptilian Christian Crusade. At his peak in the 1930s and 1940s, Pegler was a leading popularizer of one of the most concerted antidemocratic crusades in this country's history: the vicious backlash against the New Deal and the labor movement to which it gave legal protection. This anti-Roosevelt front included the country's major industrialists, anti-Semitic, red-baiting pamphleteers, Congressman Martin Dies' Committee on Un-American Activities, and an assortment of Depression-era demagogues (and men on horseback who conspired with Hitler's agents in this country).

Although Pegler did not turn against Roosevelt until the president's second term, he quickly became a shrill cheerleader for the right's campaign to paint the New Deal's democratic advances as an internationalist Communist plot. Pegler compared union advocates of the closed shop to Hitler's "goose-steppers." (In his view, the greatest threat to the country was the corrupt labor boss; his exposé of a union official's mob connections earned him a Pulitzer in 1941.) By the 1950s, however, Pegler was showing some nostalgia for the Third Reich. His proposal for "smashing" the AF of L and the CIO was for the state to take them over. "Yes, that would be fascism," he wrote. "But I, who detest fascism, see advantages in such fascism."

The absence of such "isms" in The New Yorker article verges on the perverse, reducing the great political forces that Pegler shaped and was shaped by to the idiosyncrasies of a sui generis newspaperman. In admiring Pegler's famous declaration of solidarity with the common man—"I am a member of the rabble in good standing"—Buckley neglects to say that it came from a column in praise of a California lynch mob that killed two (white) men charged with a kidnapping-murder (though he mentions this case elsewhere in the piece). And I doubt readers would be charmed by Pegler's unyielding disregard for "the least inhibition of political correctness" if Buckley had offered examples of that steadfastness: his assertion in November 1963 (at the height of the civil rights movement) that it is "clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry"; his embrace of the label racist, "a common but false synonym for Nazi, used by the bigots of New York"; or his habit of calling Jews "geese," because they hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake.

Then there is Buckley's treatment of the libel suit that supposedly turned Pegler against the Jews. Quentin Reynolds—one of the first foreign correspondents to warn American readers about Hitler—sued Pegler in 1949 after Pegler charged Reynolds, in his column, "with lying, with physical cowardice, and with immorality." (Presumably the unnamed "immorality" is communism; Pegler had called Reynolds a Communist sympathizer.) When Louis Nizer, Reynolds' lawyer, won his client the largest judgment ever awarded in punitive damages ($175,000) after five years of litigation, the country was by then under the spell of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy's name goes unmentioned in the article, even though he was the political hero shared by Pegler and Buckley. Pegler was the McCarthy committee's occasional collaborator as well as its big media flack. Buckley, meanwhile, co-authored (with one of the senator's future speechwriters) what Sam Tanenhaus described in the New York Review of Books as "the most sustained defense of McCarthy," the 1954 best-seller McCarthy and His Enemies. In it, the authors spell out rather chillingly whom the McCarthyites' true target was: not the then virtually dead American Communist Party but the liberals who had "no stomach for battle" and had criticized the red-hunters for trampling the Bill of Rights.

[snip]

Lovely fella.