Coming Apart? Pat Buchanan Says U.S. is a 'Nation in Crisis'

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity & Colmes," November 26, 2007. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: Our friend Pat Buchanan highlights what he calls a nation in crisis in his explosive brand-new book, it's called "Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology and Greed are Tearing America Apart."

In the book he takes aim at illegal immigration calling it the greatest invasion in our nation's history.

Joining us now with his first interview about his brand-new book out today, "Day of Reckoning," former presidential candidate himself, Pat Buchanan. Do you miss those old days?

PAT BUCHANAN, AUTHOR, "DAY OF RECKONING"/CONSERVATIVE COMMENTATOR: Yeah, this would have been my time. It's a little past it for me but my ideas are out there.

HANNITY: Look, I've said this to you many times. We're friends. Pat Buchanan is often ahead of his time. You were way ahead of your time on immigration in the debate in this country. Here's what you say in the book, and it scares me because a lot of — having read the book now, I'm afraid this may be true.

"America is coming apart. Decomposing. And the likelihood of her survival as one nation is improbable and impossible if America continues on its current course."

Pat Buchanan, that's a scary scenario for all of us who love this country.

BUCHANAN: It is. But take a look at the unity we had, say in the 1950s and early 1960s. What have we gone through? You had a cultural war that's divided us completely on matters of morality. You've got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country. You've got the melting pot that once welded us all together, which has broken down.

All of these things are happening, Sean, and frankly we've got have the kind of solid, firm, national leadership you need to deal with this crisis.

HANNITY: You say we're on a path of national suicide. I want to ask this question directly because you say it's a day of reckoning. Do you really believe that America, the country we all love as we know it, is in jeopardy of existing?

BUCHANAN: Here's what I think. I think America may exist, but I tell you this. I do believe we're going to lose the American Southwest. I think it is almost inevitable. If we do not put a fence on that border .

HANNITY: I agree with you.

BUCHANAN: You're going to have 100 million Hispanics in the country, most of them new immigrants from Mexico which believes that belongs to them. What's going to happen to us, Sean, in my judgment, is what is happening right now. We are Balkanizing. We are dividing and separating from one another politically, morally — on issues like abortion, or Terry Schiavo — racially and ethnically when you get Jena and then you get Don Imus, and all of the things ripping us apart. All these things that used to pull us together and hold us together, no longer do.

HANNITY: You say that the greatest invasion in history of the Third World, etc., etc., talking about the invasion on our borders, and I agree with you. That to me is the number one security issue we have.

You talk about the culture is collapsing, the nation is being deconstructed along lines of race and class in America, a fiscal crisis is looming. Medicare, Social Security is going bankrupt, and we don't have politicians that can get along enough to solve the problems.

BUCHANAN: What we've got, Sean, is we've got a perfect storm of crises. You mentioned the fiscal crises. We all know Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are going to explode. Foreign policy, since the Cold War has ended we've cut our Navy in half and we've cut our Air Force almost in half and our armed forces almost in half —yet we've added six Warsaw Pact nations, three former provinces of the Soviet Union to NATO.

ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: Mr. Buchanan. So who does Brother Buchanan support for president?

BUCHANAN: I don't support any of them.

Let me say this. On the issue of trade I think Duncan Hunter is right there. I think he is the best one for the Republican Party .

COLMES: Who do you support that could win?

BUCHANAN: Look, I can't vote for Barack Obama or your candidate Mrs. Clinton, so...

COLMES: She's not my candidate. I like all those people on the Democratic side, but who could you vote for on the right?

BUCHANAN: When it gets down to it, it gets down to probably who's going to name justices to the Supreme Court? That's one primary consideration and secondly who's going to manage our foreign policy to keep us out of unnecessary wars?

COLMES: And the answer is?

BUCHANAN: And the answer is, probably going to be the Republican nominee, but we'll have to wait and see.

COLMES: It's not going to be Pat Buchanan this year.

But look, you talk about — what you said about immigration, and Sean has the quote in the book where you talk about it being the biggest problem we face, these "Third World" people coming over here. Isn't this is same kind of argument the No Nothing Party used back two centuries ago where they said beware of the Irish Catholics, they're going to be more loyal to the pope, you've got to watch out, the very same people who warned about your ancestors, you're using the same rhetoric.

HANNITY: That would actually be the the Buchanans and the Hannitys.

COLMES: I'm talking to Buchanan right now. Go ahead.

BUCHANAN: Look, they should have been about the Irish coming over here. All those characters.

COLMES: They should have been worried about your ancestors coming here?

BUCHANAN: Look. Did you see the "Gangs of New York"? The movie?

COLMES: I have not seen that movie.

BUCHANAN: Well, look, there was tremendous bloodshed between the native Americans and the Irish, they came in for four years, several million of them, it took up until the 1920s, 1930s to fully assimilate.

COLMES: They shouldn't have allowed your ancestors in. You shouldn't be here right now.

BUCHANAN: You're making a false analogy. I'm saying that it did work, the melting pot worked with the Irish, the Jews, the Germans, the Scotch-Irish, and we were all melded, but that doesn't mean you can bring the whole world in here in numbers we have never known before, no nation has never known before and it's going to work again .

COLMES: We got the same warnings back then. And now we find out that second generation Mexicans speak English, third generation, fourth generation. They almost all speak English, they all become assimilated to our culture just as you did and your father did after your grandparents came here.

BUCHANAN: Let me tell you the difference in the American Southwest. The fastest growing television stations and radio stations are Hispanic. There's a huge number of folks contiguous to Mexico. Our ancestors came across the seas. And look they've got their own language, their own culture. They don't want to be Americans!

COLMES: You know what a hard break is. We're going to do it right now and come back with Pat Buchanan.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COLMES: We now continue with the author of the explosive new book, "Day of Reckoning," former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

Your days of running are over, right? That's finished? No more of that?

BUCHANAN: I think so.

COLMES: All right. You and he were singing "Kumbaya" there before about things you agree with in his book. Now here are some other things you said with which I agree:

You say Iraq, the invasion, the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history. That's quite a statement.

BUCHANAN: Well, I think it was. I really do. I think it was a mistake to go in for the president of the United States and, more importantly, for this country, because I'd never thought Saddam Hussein — even though I believed he had some chemical or biological weapons — I never thought he was a threat to our country.

COLMES: And you went on to say it's the result of a messianic ideology that George Bush adopted after 9/11.

BUCHANAN: Yes, this is the point. This is one of the key chapters. You ask yourself, look, Bush is an intelligent man. He's got passion, conviction. And yet he speaks in a messianic fashion about if we don't democratize the world, we cannot be free.

This is an ideology rooted in Wilsonism and neo-conservatism. And I think he didn't come to office with that. He came saying we need a humble foreign policy. We've got to get out of this nation-building.

COLMES: What convinced him otherwise? Just 9/11, by itself?

BUCHANAN: No, not 9/11. It was also the triumph in Afghanistan. And he did not come in with a formed foreign policy, as his father did, who was very much a pragmatist. And I think he's been wedded and converted to it.

And I go through about ten of his speeches, and you take out phrases and statements and quotes they're are very eloquent, but they're quasi-religion, a real belief.

COLMES: You say the Axis of Evil speech, you say, the most reckless speech ever given by a U.S. president.

BUCHANAN: When we're fighting in Afghanistan, and we've got the world with us, and we're winning, and that's where the enemy is, to suggest we're going to go to war against three nations, none of whom had attacked us, and hand down ultimatums, to me it was a massive distraction. I can feel the hot breath of Brother Hannity.

COLMES: We want to pull you over here to the left just a little bit. But you know, is this where left meets right? Where you are — you've been described as an isolationist. Is that a fair description of your point of view?

BUCHANAN: I'm not, but I do think this. I'm not — I mean, I'm not an interventionist. I do believe the United States has commitments to go to war on behalf of some 60 nations around the world. We make, you know, Victoria's empire look like it was isolationist. And we've got the smallest army we've had since 1939. That is not realism.

COLMES: You want — yes, you want us to get out of Russia, too. You want us to pull the troops back, get the troops out of all — wherever we have United States troops.

BUCHANAN: Look, the Russians got up and walked out of Eastern Europe. They moved their army behind the Urals. They let Eastern Europe go free. They let 15 nations break up. What did we move NATO into their face for?

COLMES: Would you bring every troop from all over the world? Where would you keep American troops?

BUCHANAN: I would keep them, certainly, in Guam. But I think bring them out of Korea. The Chinese went home in 1955. What are we doing with 30,000 people defending South Korea, which has an economy 40 times the size of the North and twice the population?

HANNITY: All right. Brother Buchanan, I'm going to resist the temptation to go down the Iraq road.

Isn't it very similar, though? Reagan said we were the last great hope for man on this earth. He called the Soviets an evil empire. He supported the freedom fighters, the Nicaraguan Contras. He supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan at the time, to the battle against the Soviets.

You have a chapter in here, you know, "Who Shall Inherit the Earth?", that the American century is over, and we are the last great hope for man on earth. America better be the military might in this world. No?

BUCHANAN: Oh, listen, you've got to be — America has got to be No. 1, and we are No. 1. Far and away, we spend more on defense than the next ten nations combined. But we are not omnipotent, and we're not omniscient.

And look, we cannot — we've got a commitment to go to war against Russia for Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. You know, when [the] Solidarity [movement] was crushed in Poland, I urged the president, cut the Eastern empire in default on all their loans. You'll destroy their credit rating. No, he wouldn't do it.

What did he do? He put troops in Lebanon, and they got killed. You had 241 of them got killed, and he pulled them out.

Let me tell you a story that somebody told me on his very last day in office. Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, and there were three people with him. And he turned around and was about to go up to the inaugural. And he said, "Lebanon was my worst mistake." And he saluted and walked out.

But here's a great — I think he was a good man and a great president. He had the courage, in effect, to say, "It was a mistake. We put them into the middle of a civil war. I lost them. It is my fault, but we don't want to compound the felony."

HANNITY: You talk at length that America's best days may very well be behind us, Pat. You talk about it culturally.

BUCHANAN: Right.

HANNITY: You talk about the border situation. You talk about a smaller army, but yet we have more troops in need around the world, etc., etc., here.

BUCHANAN: Right.

HANNITY: What is the antidote? What is the solution? I mean...

BUCHANAN: Look, look, the final — the chapter "Who Inherits the Earth?" it's not going to be — the Chinese have a claim on it. They're very powerful and they're moving.

HANNITY: And they're building the military.

BUCHANAN: And they've got great weaknesses.

The Europeans are rich economically, but they're dying.

You take the Islamic empire. I'm not that concerned about Islamaascism or whatever it is for this reason. These guys do not have — they can't park a bicycle straight.

I mean, their countries, what do they do? The countries have an economy together, the Arab countries, the size of Spain's, and they can't defeat the United States. What they can do is commit acts of terror, which cause us to do away with some of our freedoms.

HANNITY: But they can cripple the world, but this goes to our area of disagreement here. Remember, Saddam invaded an innocent country, raped and pillaged it. He literally put the world's oil supplies in jeopardy. In a post-9/11 world, Pat, this is so important. And fundamental to disagreement.

But in a post-9/11 world, we couldn't risk weapons of mass destruction aligned with a guy that showed he had a propensity to use it and aligned with terrorism that way.

BUCHANAN: Well, first, he didn't use his weapons of mass destruction.

HANNITY: Used them against the Kurds.

BUCHANAN: He didn't use them about the United States of America.

HANNITY: He used them against the Kurds, and he also put the world's oil supply in jeopardy.

BUCHANAN: He didn't use them against the Israelis. He didn't use them against the Americans in 1999.

HANNITY: If he did it once, he can do it again.

BUCHANAN: You don't step on Superman's cape. He's not going to — look, this guy...

COLMES: You guys ought to do a debate show.

Good to see you, Pat.

HANNITY: Good to see you, brother.

COLMES: Best of luck. Thanks so much for being with us tonight.

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