MSNBC has
finally, after a full decade, taken the hint and
dropped Pat Buchanan from their network. Officially, he was fired for authoring the blatantly white supremacist tome
Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? Some of the more
revealing quotes from his book:
Those who believe the rise to power of an Obama rainbow coalition of peoples of color means the whites who helped to engineer it will steer it are deluding themselves. The whites may discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.
Not until the 1960s did courts begin to use the Fourteenth Amendment to impose a concept of equality that the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, The Federalist Papers, and the Gettysburg Address never believed in. Before the 1960s, equality meant every citizen enjoyed the same constitutional rights and the equal protection of existing laws. Nothing in the Constitution or federal law mandated social, racial, or gender equality.
If [conservative political commentator Heather] Mac Donald’s statistics are accurate, 49 of every 50 muggings and murders in New York are the work of minorities. That might explain why black folks have trouble getting a cab. Every New York cabby must know the odds, should he pick up a man of color at night.
What the above points to is a strategy from which Republicans will recoil, a strategy to increase the GOP share of the white Christian vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social, cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white minority. If the GOP is not the party of New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci and Cambridge cop James Crowley, it has no future. And although Howard Dean disparages the Republicans as the “white party,” why should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?
But anyone even remotely familiar with Pat Buchanan should not, in any way, be surprised by this. The entirety of his political career has been marked by racism, sexism, homophobia and religious bigotry. A former aid to President Nixon, himself a despicable racist and anti-Semite, Buchanan
advised him not to visit Coretta Scott King on the one year anniversary of her husband's assassination, claiming that it would "outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse." Just for good measure he added that, "Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history." In his 1988 autobiography
Right from the Beginning he waxed nostalgic for the days when America was officially segregated: "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." If anyone recalls Ronald Reagan's trip to Bitburg Cemetary to commemorate the lives of Nazi SS troops, it was Pat Buchanan who pushed for him to do so, and was even responsible for writing the line in Reagan's speech which referred to them as "victims." In a 1990
New York Post column he
attacked the idea that Jews were systematically exterminated in death camps such as Treblinka, claiming that "During the war, the underground government of the Warsaw Ghetto reported to London that the Jews of Treblinka were being electrocuted and steamed to death...The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody." He has,
on at least two occasions, openly defended Adolf Hitler. On the subject of HIV/AIDS he
said, "The poor homosexuals — they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution." He even claimed that gay men and lesbians should not even be allowed to handle food in restaurants, let alone have the same rights heterosexuals enjoy. And on and on, ad nauseum. What took MSNBC this long? To have a blatant white nationalist, Holocaust denier, Nazi sympathizer and all around small-minded bigot on your channel and to give him a daily platform to spew this toxic drivel? Unbelievable, MSNBC.
