Confession: I kind of like Pat Buchanan. He’s a little like that loopy and feared uncle that you only see on very special occasions, the guy who seems genial and reasonable and maybe even insightful at times and you start to wonder what all the fuss was about and why everyone avoids him and you start to make secret plans to sort of draw him back into the family fold because clearly everyone was overstating past problems and besides he seems to have changed and -

- and then somebody accidentally mentions one of his “hot button” topics and your new favorite uncle suddenly turns into a frothing, raving madman, upends the dining room table, rips off his clothes and goes running naked out the door and down the suburban streets while singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the top of his lungs.

Pat Buchanan’s like that. And this “Deep Throat” business has pushed his buttons, which means that later tonight the police will be extracting his naked, shivering form from a neighbor’s azalea bush. Metaphorically, at least. (I hope.)

Pat’s column today is truly a work of art, the newsprint equivalent of your caterwauling naked uncle. All this Watergate talk has brought on psychedelic flashbacks and some truly bad craziness. It’s a cartoonish exaggeration of some of the bizarre conservative backlash against W. Mark Felt and his newly revealed role in the Nixon meltdown.

The demonization is there, yes (Buchanan calls Felt a “corrupt cop,” a “toady,” and full of “malice” and “spite”). So is the requisite absurd understatement of the scandal (a mere “escapade” and a coverup that Nixon became “ensnared” in). But then Pat ups the ante to the point where even the most unhinged young conservative pundit is going to have to just step back and whistle appreciatively. See, Buchanan goes on to win the Vietnam War for us.

Don’t laugh. This is how good revisionism starts. Take notes.

By 1973, all U.S. troops were home, the POWs were headed for Clark Field, every provincial capital was in Saigon’s hands and Richard Nixon was at 69 percent. And the establishment was beside itself with hatred.

And so they resolved to finish him… And when he went down, Southeast Asia and everything 58,000 Americans had bled and died for went down with him.

Wow! We won. We liberated Vietnam, just like we’d planned. And then Woodward and Bernstein and Felt pretty much handed the place over to the VC in exchange for 24 bucks worth of beads and trinkets and an autographed headshot of Ho Chi Minh. But until that betrayal, we were the winners.

It’s amazing how history was distorted along the way. To read the text books or the websites or the actual accounts from the time, you’d think that the Nixon administration realized that we couldn’t prevail, engineered a competent retreat aided by a peace agreement that everyone knew wouldn’t hold, and packed it in while the North Vietnamese returned to the peaceful business of utterly destroying the southern republic. Bizarrely, it’s hard to find any indication in the histories that we’d actually secured the place and that everything would’ve worked out fine for South Vietnam if that whole overblown Watergate thing hadn’t happened.

So no wonder Buchanan’s angry with Felt. The guy’s responsible for 58,000 Americans dying in vain.

It’s possible that this revision is too big for even the most fanatical Republican cheerleader to swallow, let alone mainstream America. Even if the battalions of Baby Buchanans manage to transmogrify the Watergate crisis into the story of some dirty hippies and bad cops framing the President, it’s hard to imagine that our collective memory of the Vietnam War’s tragic outcome could be remade so completely. I’m not sure Pat’s going to succeed on this one.

But you gotta admire him for trying.

Now someone, please, lend the guy some clothes and get him home.