What Is Up With MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan?

Frankly, little should surprise any of us as we listen to the old and pitiful rantings of far-right winger Pat Buchanan, an MSNBC regular who seems to long for a bygone era that most of us are happy to leave in the past.

Check out this Media Matters for America post as it documents some of the words of Buchanan who once again seems to be coming to the historical rescue/defense of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.

Whether he is trying to rehabilitate Hitler or not, Buchanan is nuts to bring up this kind of talk.

Media Matters for America:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/200909020026

Pat Buchanan’s blog:
http://buchanan.org/blog/did-hitler-want-war-2068

Media Matters Posts A Top Ten List Of Its Own

I found this interesting. Media Matters for America writer Karl Frisch wrote the following: I humbly present a Top Ten list of “Right-Wingers From Whom Conservatives Should Be Demanding Apologies.”

10) Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, for falsely claiming a hate-crimes bill that adds gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans to the list of protected groups would also protect those who commit incest, necrophilia, pedophilia, bestiality, and a host of other perversions.

9) Fox News’ Sean Hannity, for hosting “Internet journalist” Andy Martin, who once called a judge a “crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

8) Syndicated radio host Neal Boortz, for describing welfare recipients as “human parasitic garbage lining up to get their applications to loot.”

7) Fox News conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Glenn Beck, for describing Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court as, “Hey, Hispanic chick lady! You’re empathetic. … You’re in!”

6) MSNBC’s resident cranky uncle, Pat Buchanan, for saying prior to Sotomayor’s selection that he wanted Obama to pick a Supreme Court justice “who has real stature, impresses people” but thinking instead that Obama would pick “a minority, a woman and/or a Hispanic.”

5) Syndicated radio host Jim Quinn, for repeatedly calling NOW the “National Organization of Whores.”

4) Cincinnati-based radio host Bill Cunningham, for allegingthat “Obama wants to gas the Jews.”

3) Michael Savage (née Weiner), the third-highest-rated radio host in America, for saying“Obama hates” and “is raping America.”

2) Fox News’ irrepressible mega-star Bill O’Reilly, for repeatedly quacking that the legalization of gay marriage could lead to folks marrying ducks.

And No. 1, the conservative movement’s de facto leader, Rush Limbaugh, for sayingof Obama, “We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles … because his father was black.”

Pat Buchanan And Racism: Joined At The Hip

Far-right commentator Pat Buchanan, with a history of racist comments about people of color, is up to his old tricks, again. Writing for Human Events.com, is making yet another vicious and race-based attack on Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who is President Barack Obama’s nominee to serve on the U.S. Supreme court. Buchanan has repeatedly attacked her because of her race and marginalized her accomplishments by portraying her as some kind of affirmative-action fraud (an attack most typically used by white supremacists when they make their complaints about how tough the U.S. government has been on white men).

Here are some of Buchanan’s comments:

BUCHANAN: Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.

This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.

One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated “with the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

While Pat Buchanan may prefer the old bigotry that includes slavery, slave plantations, lynchings, legalized murder, the Ku Klux Klan in political power, women being treated as servants of their husbands with few rights of their own and other remnants of a best-forgotten period of U.S. history, rational people do not.

Following Pat Buchanan’s logic: white males succeed because they work harder, they’re smarter and they’re better … people of color succeed because of affirmative action, white guilt and reverse racism.

Human Events.com:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32264

Find Out What Pat Buchanan Is All About

Pat Buchanan, a failed multiple-time candidate for president and currently a commentator for MSNBC, has said more than his fair share of offensive things over the years.

But, reading this article from Media Matters for America, chronicling Buchanan’s history, should leave most rational people feeling nothing short of disgusted.

Here’s one sample:

Last year, Buchanan suggested that slavery worked out pretty well for “black folks”:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Nice. He attempts to portray the brutal Middle Passage, that forcibly brought slaves (those who were not among the millions who died) to the present-day United States of America, as some luxury-liner cruise to paradise.

Media Matters:
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200906080008

Compilation Of White (Male) Right’s Activist Pat Buchanan Smearing Sonia Sotomayor

Media Matters assembled this series of clips of Pat Buchanan, sounding like an activist for the rights of white males, smearing Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee to replace retiring U.S. Supreme Court justice David Souter.

Right-Wing Hater Pat Buchanan Continues To Attack Sonia Sotomayor

Far-right commentator Pat Buchanan is continuing his Sonia Sotomayor Attack Tour. Here is the latest attack by Buchanan against Sotomayor, who would be the first Hispanic woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court if she is confirmed after being nominated by President Barack Obama. Instead of saluting the historic nature of this appointment, Buchanan continues to attack the way she allegedly learned to speak English.

What a classy guy.

BUCHANAN: Well I, again in that Saturday piece, she went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children’s books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you’re, frankly if you’re in college and you’re working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don’t think that’s college work.

Buchanan, of course, is not above unprovoked attacks against minorities or women. In this case, he gets the best of both of his worlds by attacking a woman minority. Buchanan is a left-over man who is troubled by seeing an increase in minority populations. He seems to see something slipping away from him and he is choosing to fade angrily and loudly into the night.

Think Progress:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/01/buchanan-sotomayor-english/

Pat Buchanan Again Attacks President Barack Obama Using Race

Media Matters has documented numerous instances of conservative media figures trying to portray President Obama as a mafia-type figure (which lead to racist stereotypes of Italians, but that is another story for another time). But, one of the comments I found particularly interesting was written by the diversity-challenged Pat Buchanan.

This is from Media Matters:

In a May 15 column, MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan claimed: “On war and torture, at least, [liberals] thought Barack was one of them. He is not. Barack is not into ideology. He is into Barack. As he showed in 2008, when he threw his white grandmother under the bus and spared his beloved black pastor, the Rev. Wright, then threw Wright under the bus when his toxicity level rose too high, Barack has all the sentimentality of Michael Corleone when it comes to the family business.”

Notice Buchanan’s use of race. President Obama is portrayed as having thrown his “white” grandmother under the bus and having saved his “black” pastor. Again, this is part of an orchestrated right-wing smear to portray President Obama as being hostile toward whites (which is utterly ridiculous).

Lindsey Graham Continues To Take Sonia Sotomayor’s Comments Out Of Context

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham was on Fox News Sunday taking U.S. Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s comments out of context to inflame the Republican base. Sen. Graham, like so many others, chooses to take the comments of Sotomayor out of context to fire up the largely white and very conservative Republican base (this is, of course, why you hear people like Pat Buchanan referring to her as an affirmative action selection).

“What she said is that based on her life experiences is that she thought a Latina woman, somebody with her background, would be a better judge than a guy like me — a white guy from South Carolina,” Graham said. “It is troubling, and it’s inappropriate and I hope she’ll apologize.”

She has nothing to apologize for with regard to those comments. What Sen. Graham and others on the right should apologize for is taking what she said out of context. Perhaps if they put it into context, to be fair, and then called for an apology … they might have a (shaky) leg to stand on.

Fox News:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/05/31/graham-calls-sotomayor-apologize-wise-latina-statement/

Good To See One Republican Step Up To Condemn Attacks Against

It’s good tosee Republican Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, trying to keep an open mind in a party that is working hard to attack U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor on a number of racial, racist and sexist fronts. Leading the attacks have been the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan and others. Other Republican leaders need to step forward and wrest control of the party away from the far-right extremists.

“I think it’s terrible. This is not the kind of tone any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advise and consent.”

CNN:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/28/top-republican-calls-limbaugh-gingrich-comments-terrible/

Great Blog By Crooks And Liars On Republicans Calling Sonia Sotomayor Racist

Crooks and Liars has a story about some of the far right wingers laughably trying to portray Sonia Sotomayor as a racist – if not calling her one outright. It’s the usual far-right individuals talking up that aspect. It all begins, as one might expect, from individuals like current Republican leader Rush Limbaugh and former conservative leaders like Pat Buchanan.

Crooks and Liars:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/look-whos-calling-sonia-sotomayor-ra