Saturday, June 6, 2009

Chris Will You Please Stop Booking This Racist Pig

Lifted from yesterday's Salon Opinion Piece by Joe Conason
This has been a screaming point for me for a long time. I do not understand why Chris Matthews or any News Show host on MSNBC would book this racist prick.

In Washington media circles, Pat Buchanan is a well-liked and avuncular figure, presumably owing to his personal qualities rather than his crank politics, but for him to be encouraged to pontificate endlessly on the subject of race on television is worse than ludicrous. The late William F. Buckley Jr. expelled Buchanan from the pages of the National Review many years ago for his crudely anti-Semitic rants, which included a very unattractive tinge of admiration for Hitler. (Prejudice against Jews, unlike some other forms of bigotry, is anathema to most conservatives.) So obnoxious was Pat's blustering bully-boy attitude that he became intolerable even to the intolerant.

As for racism, where to begin with him? Discussing Sotomayor on MSNBC, Buchanan accused her of adopting the same attitudes that had kept blacks down in old Dixie. "Her entire career is based on advancing people of color, which is done at the expense of white people," he cried in that familiar high-pitched whine. "That was what was done in the South. They're doing it now to white males now…"

Except that Pat didn't mind so much when "they" were doing it to black folks in the South. He explicitly supported the race-based "Southern strategy" of his old boss Richard Nixon, whom he advised to avoid meeting with Coretta King one year after the murder of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr. In April 1969, he warned Nixon in a White House memo that visiting Mrs. King would "outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse ... Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history."

Did Pat's views toward blacks and other minorities mellow over the decades? More than 20 years later, he was still supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa, noting that there was nothing in our own Constitution that would preclude a white minority ruling a black majority. (Such is the color-blind jurisprudence that he would no doubt like to see on the high court. Of course, he also told Nixon to burn the Watergate tapes, a key indication of his deep respect for law and justice.)

In his memoir, "Right From the Start," he suggested that the segregated District of Columbia of his boyhood had worked just fine:

"There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The "negroes" of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."

14 comments:

Cirze said...

Go US!

Let's wipe that piece of phlegm off the map once and for all.

Thanks for the reporting.

S

Anonymous said...

Intolerant and intolerable; he's really run the gamut.

Laura said...

I've never liked that guy. Thanks for reminding me why.
What a jackass. If he feels that white men are being treated the way that black men used to be treated then he'd better hope they don't brink back lynching. My guess he'd be first on somebody's list.
I'm with you ... why are people still listening to this jerk?
((Hugs))
Laura

Randal Graves said...

Ratings.

Oberon said...

...you could join globalove think tank...if you wanted to.

themom said...

His sister Bay, is out there defending a former co-worker (I believe), who was fired from his job for using the "n" word. Their veins are just oozing BIGOTRY. Why does he still get all this airtime? Oh, the rethuglicans have to get their fix!

Commander Zaius said...

Chris seems to want to keep such people like Pat and Tom DeLay just because they are what the are, shallow minded pigs.

Lulu Maude said...

amen.

Paul said...

I love that line/phrase: "that he (Buchanan) became intolerable even to the intolerant."

Thanks for the whole post, Utah.

Paul said...

I was inspired by this to go read some more about and by Buchanan, who I only knew a little about.

I found among a lot of things that the Anti-Defamation League noted that Buchanan has made several recent appearances on the "Political Cesspool", which is a white supremacist radio show broadcast from Millington, Tennessee.

Also, (btw) Buchanan is opposed to abortion even for the victims of rape:

"I don't care about the circumstances of a child's conception........you want to execute someone in the case of rape, execute the rapist and let the child live."

Fran said...

Pat reminisces about the good old days of segregation?

Get the hook!!!

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

The only caveat I would add is that Michael Kinsley and some of his other friends who are Jewish say that Mr. Buchanan isn't anti-Semetic. Perhaps he's hoodwinked these individuals. Who knows.

Non Je Ne Regrette Rien said...

I guess racists need somewhere to go and mingle with their people ....

enigma4ever said...

oh I was so so glad that you posted this...I hate Pat he is a total pig and WHY is he on there ?????