If there's any problem with DKos, it's that some of the diarists are so young! (That's snark...really) But when I read the constant complaining about the perennial pundit Pat Buchanan on MSNBC, I realize that the audience in general doesn't know who he is.
Genial grandfather? Not! I'm going to put a few quotes from this guy into context below, then ask that you demand that MSNBC stop throwing this guy in our faces.
From FAIR a quote from his own autobiography:
On race relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s: "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." (Right from the Beginning, Buchanan's 1988 autobiography, p. 131)
From the same source, his view of history:
Trying to justify apartheid in South Africa, he denounced the notion that "white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong. Where did we get that idea? The Founding Fathers did not believe this." (syndicated column, 2/7/90) He referred admiringly to the apartheid regime as the "Boer Republic": "Why are Americans collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy to ruin her with sanctions?" (syndicated column, 9/17/89)
Buchanan's bigotry doesn't stop with melanin:
Buchanan on affirmative action: "How, then, can the feds justify favoring sons of Hispanics over sons of white Americans who fought in World War II or Vietnam?" (syndicated column, 1/23/95)
Writing of "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody." (New Republic, 10/22/90) Buchanan's columns have run in the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter and other publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.
At least then he was honest. When hundreds of voters in a precinct in a synagoge in Delray Beach Florida allegedly voted for him (punching a second hole in the ballot for Lieberman), he told local news he knew it was a mistake!
Old stuff? NOT! Here's a quote from this year from his website
Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?
Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?
As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?
Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?
Don Imus makes one inappropriate comment that he mistakenly thinks is funny, and he's out on his skinny rear end. Buchanan gets rich despite an entire career of racism. Why is it tolerated? Why has the NAACP or Al Sharpton not pushed back? Don't they realize that Buchanan's constant sniping is driving potential bigots to his website?