President
Barack Obama is displaying a "dereliction of duty" by shunning a trip to the Texas border while traipsing about Denver being photographed playing pool and drinking beer, conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan said on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
Buchanan is the author of
"The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority," currently on the Amazon bestseller list. He characterized the president's behavior as an affront to all Americans concerned about the child migrant crisis taking place at the southern border.
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"He's got … a constitutional obligation to defend the borders of the United States," Buchanan said. "Transparently, he is not doing it and the idea that he's out there in Denver playing pool and drinking beer suggests a certain amount of contempt for the people who are concerned about this issue, who have raised this issue, and correctly made it an issue."
Buchanan, who served as communications director for President Ronald Reagan, advised Obama's advisers to have a blunt conversation with the commander in chief about how his actions are perceived.
"You are putting out a message of indifference to what is happening on the border when the whole country is consumed by it, especially the American southwest," Buchanan said.
"You're going to go to Texas and you're not going to the border. Sir, do you understand the message you are sending to the American people? Which is either, 'I don't give a hoot,' or 'nobody's going to tell me what I have to do and nobody's going to tell me what my obligations of duties are.'
"But really it is a manifest message ... that 'I really don't give a damn about what is going on in the American border. I'll give them $4 billion and tell him to fix it.'"
In a separate interview on "The Steve Malzberg Show,'' Buchanan urged the U.S. to get tough with Iraq and demand they defend themselves against the al-Qaida splinter group ISIS if they want more American aid.
"The Iraqi Army … is not going to defend its own city of Mosul. You're not sending American kids over there to get the city back for them,'' Buchanan said. "We will back you up, but we're not sending troops anymore.''
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Buchanan also fired back at former assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle, who last month told Malzberg that Buchanan's blaming George W. Bush "and the neocons" for the current Iraq crisis shows he not only "misunderstood" U.S. policy but also derogatorily used a term used by "hateful critics" to refer to Jewish Americans.
"Most Jewish folks are not neo-conservatives. They're a very small, self-identified group whose godfathers were Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol and who claimed to be the co-architects along with the Bush-Cheney folks of the war in Iraq,'' Buchanan said.
"Richard Perle, my old friend … was one of those folks that self-identified as neo-conservatives. I'm called a paleo-conservative, which translates 'old conservatives.' Neo-conservatives were the new conservatives. It's a commonly used term.''
"Look, Richard Perle was deeply pushing the war in Iraq … Some of these folks are running away from what they have done. They don't like to be identified with what they did.''
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