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Like all great jokes, Maher's gag was a flip way of telling the truth. Calling Buchanan a fascist sounds so knee-jerk lefty that it's a sure bet to keep yourself from being taken seriously. What, then, do you do when faced with "A Republic, Not an Empire"? Though it's clear that Buchanan, who's now in the midst of his third presidential campaign, doesn't have any chance of reaching the White House, how can he be dismissed as a fringe lunatic when he's courting a party nomination that would give him access to federal matching funds?

"A Republic, Not an Empire" is Buchanan's assessment of American foreign policy. He's against it.

A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny By Patrick J. Buchanan Regnery Publishing, 437 pages Nonfiction Buy A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny by Patrick J. Buchanan

In Buchanan's view, international obligations to defend democracy are so harshly stretching and depleting our resources that we're on our way to becoming a played-out power. This state of affairs, he tells us, is the legacy of the shortsighted, arrogant "interventionists" (FDR and Winston Churchill among them) who would have us extend our protection to areas of the world without strategic importance to us. The conventional term for people who hold Buchanan's views, "isolationists," is, he tells us, "a dismissive slur on the tradition of U.S. independence in foreign policy and nonintervention in foreign wars," and he cites addresses by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams to back his claim up.

His language, though, is from a less rich oratorical strain, half John Birch Society pamphleteer ("the free-trade über-alles policy of the administration") and fire-and-brimstone preacher:

A day of reckoning is approaching. It is my hope that the price in blood, treasure, and humiliation America will eventually be forced to pay for the hubris, arrogance, and folly of our reigning foreign policy elites is not, God forbid, war, defeat, and the diminution of the Republic -- the fate of every other great nation or empire that set out on this same course.

It would take a team of historians weeks to ferret out all the omissions, contradictions and outright lies in this celebration of what Sen. Arlen Specter, referring last week to the Republicans who voted to defeat the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, called Fortress America. But Buchanan's intentions are perfectly clear, and the story he tells -- it stretches from Washington's 1754 march to Fort Duquesne to the present, making its most significant stop at World War II -- is all of a piece. It would be nice to be able to dismiss the volume as a boy's-book adventure imagined by a pug-faced schoolyard bully. But the stink of death rises too strongly from its pages to treat it as a joke.

"A Republic, Not an Empire" puts forth a consistent view of American strength built on foreign corpses. Among the sacrifices Buchanan considers acceptable are the Eastern European Jews slaughtered by Hitler, the Chileans murdered by Pinochet, the South Africans murdered under apartheid, the Nicaraguans murdered by that country's "freedom fighters" and the Kosovars slaughtered by Milosevic. None of these people, Buchanan tells us, count for enough to have deterred America from its course.

But what is that course, you might wonder, if it's not using our status as a world power to stand up against abuses that are abhorrent to our ideals -- even if our actions have sometimes suggested otherwise?

Buchanan's answer is the consolidation of might -- but might divorced from morality and responsibility. His "reclamation" of America's destiny translates into something like the United States as Nero, watching from the global sidelines as lions gobble up Christians and showing the rare mercy of a thumbs-up only to victims who can satisfactorily answer the question "What have you done for me lately?" "America is about nothing if not the preservation of liberty," Buchanan writes; but "liberty" is a word that has no relevance to him when it's applied to anyone other than Americans -- and then to only certain kinds of Americans. Just as needy foreign countries are a threat, so are foreigners within our borders: The "trend back toward hyphenated-Americanism is not a sign of national vitality, but of a dying patriotism and approaching disunion ... Continued mass immigration, legal and illegal, threatens America's national unity" -- not our resources, mind you, but our unity -- "and may yet bring the eventual breakup of this country."

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