Pat Buchanan and Putin?

“Is Putin One of Us?,”

Just in time for Christmas, Pat Buchanan has come along to alert us to the shifting alliances in the conflict between tradition and modernity. While Buchanan’s pugnacity in the culture wars has long since ceased to be news, his latest entry is jaw-dropping nonetheless. Writing last week on a right-wing Web site , he announced he’d found a new star in the paleoconservative firmament: Vladimir Putin.

 In the article “Is Putin One of Us?,” Buchanan noted that while a “de-Christianized” United States has been embracing “homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values,” Putin has stood up for the old-time virtues.

 Indeed, Putin sounds increasingly like Buchanan himself. Tolerance for gay sex, Putin has said, is an “acknowledgement of the equality of good and evil.” This “so-called tolerance,” he continues, “is genderless and infertile.” And the United States, having committed itself to the “destruction of traditional values” and the promotion of “abstract ideas” (Equality? Democracy? The pursuit of happiness?), has set itself against the greater part of humankind and religious orthodoxy everywhere.
Buchanan wasn’t content just to acclaim Putin for his “moral clarity.”

In embracing Putin, he suggested that a new global conservative bloc may be, and certainly should be, forming. Though many Americans are “still caught up in a Cold War paradigm,” he wrote, “the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-pat-buchanan-vladimir-putin-and-strange-bedfellows/2013/12/24/f8159f22-68bf-11e3-a0b9-249bbb34602c_story.html