It’s a shame that Pat Buchanan doesn’t understand the history of the Irish in this country. It’s almost weird how he manages to conflate “Irish” and “white” and “Catholicism” and “Christianity.” His people weren’t really considered white when they got here, and Catholics suffered horrible discrimination in this country until fairly recently. Not ten miles from where I live is a mass grave of over fifty Irish railroad workers who died of cholera in 1832. They were denied medical care and thrown in a ditch. No funerals. No death certificates. No acknowledgment it even happened until 1970.
The America of Pat Buchanan’s imagination never existed. And, I wonder, how long before MSNBC has a moment of conscience and stops putting this bigot on teevee? Here is Joan Walsh, reviewing Pat Buchanan’s new book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?:
The book’s most pernicious chapters seek to “prove” white superiority and black and Latino inferiority, in the U.S. and worldwide. And yet Buchanan’s cult of meritocracy can’t quite let in the information that in fact Asian-Americans are out-performing European-Americans in high schools and universities throughout America, and Asian-American family income is growing faster than that of whites. He appears to blame affirmative action for the high number of Asian and Jewish students in Ivy League schools, when in fact both groups have proven that admissions directors over the years have found shady ways to cap their enrollment despite their high achievement. He acknowledges a “white-Asian” elite in California, which he charges is being overtaxed by a lazy, underachieving black-Latino plurality supported by white liberals. But mostly he seems to see Asian-American achievement as just another affirmative action plot to take America away from white Christians. In Obama’s America, “the white working and middle class is being made to pay disproportionately for America’s past sins,” he writes. Eventually, “there is no doubt as to who will be running the country and who will be riding in the back of the bus.”
Seriously. It’s long past time for MSNBC to show some respect for their non-white viewers, fold up Pat Buchanan’s Green Room cot, and show him the door.
I agree, Pat Buchanan should be shown the door. Not just for this, but for being a general asshole for the last 30 years. No one should employ bastards like him if they want to retain their integrity.
I understand that TV networks want to maintain a sense of balance – and they should have dissenters for each issue. But Pat Buchanan is SO far out there… They don’t need to go THAT far out.
not one word you have written is a shock of any sort. he IS
MSNBC’s Resident Racist.
period
Does Maddow still have him on regularly? I don’t watch the cable tv much anymore, but she was enabling and legitimizing him as much as anyone was a few years back. Has she stopped having him on?
I seem to remember her doing a segment about him and splitting from him, but maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.
I’m not sure but I doubt that she has had himon her show more than once or twice in her years since she got her own show. She hates him and she has editorial control of her show.
However, she used to have to debate him as the designated Liberal against the designated Conservative.
She has no love for his views, but she is a diplomatic person and has respect for other people. I could see her having beers with him at the bar. But if some of the things he has said about gay people over the last few decades are his real beliefs, I can see her punching him in the face for being such an asshole at the end of the evening.
I’d love to see him on Colbert’s show.
YES!
I seem to recall them having a very testy debate fairly early on in her show, and I don’t think he’s been back since (at least not that I’ve seen).
Since I have a number of relatives with views just as appalling as Buchanan’s, I can totally understand how a person could like a horrendous bigot, and I wouldn’t fault Maddow or anyone else who had a beer with the dude. But I’m with Booman on MSNBC finally giving him the heave-ho. It’s way past time.
I disagree. I’m a white guy and the dismissal of Buchanan would be a good way for MSNBC to show its respect to me.
Right on!
true.
old news, but he just keeps adding more manure to the fetid pile; to wit, his latest “column”…A.D. 2041 — End of White America?…where he laments the truly dreadful possibility that ratpublicans…aka: “whites” are losing control:
boo fucking hoo.
that this bloated piece of excrement even gets an audience anywhere, let alone on msnbc is merely a testament to how low the nature of political discourse in the fourth estate, esp that related to race, in this country has sunk.
Pat Buchanan may be a racist and an embarrassment to millions of Irish-Catholic Americans, but nobody ever said he couldn’t count votes:
“When Texas, where two-thirds of the newborns and half the schoolchildren are Hispanic, goes the way of California, it is the end for the GOP.”
Yep. The man is right. An America where 40% of whites, 66% of Latinos and Asians, and 90% of blacks vote Democratic is an America in which Republicans steadily lose power for the foreseeable future.
(No wonder the tea partiers are so frantic about losing “their” country.)
It has been shameful to witness the mass media allow cretins like Buchanan to continue to act as transmitters of extreme right-wing bile. It’s been noted before of course that there is practically no difference between the drivel spewed by the likes of any of a number of Neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations and the drivel spewed by Buchanan, but bears repeating nonetheless.