Thursday, November 17, 2011

Buchanan: White supremacist in a business suit

I GUESS NO ONE should really be surprised that Pat Buchanan, the MSNBC commentator. author and polemicist, has written another book defining America as a Manichean struggle between pure good and devastating evil, with no pastels in between. (Or as George W. Bush once declared, "I don't do nuance.") I haven't read Buchanan's "Suicide of a Super Power", which others have asserted is so much recycled white supremicist gibberish. But based on his past syndicated columns and commentaries, Mr. B is clearly on the side of the angelic forces defending a declining white America from a takeover by Hispanics, African-Americans and any other invasive non-Caucasian whom he believes has no standing in the Constitution.

That recalls the notorious Dred Scott case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Scott had no rights because he was, after all, a slave. The issue turned on whether having resided with his master for a while in slavery-free Wisconsin he could demand his freedom once he was taken to Missouri, a slave state. The notorious Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled against Scott's freedom, thus drawing the cheers of the South. Not only that, he extended the court's decision to all slaveholders who moved their "property" anywhere in America.

Check these words from a chapter titled "The White Party" in Buchanan's book , included in a list of excerpts provided by Talking Points Memo:
'"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?"
Do you think it was a mere oversight that Buchanan overlooked all of the African-Americans and Hispanic-Amercans who died in American uniforms in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Hardly. It's not a neat fit in his rants against too much color.








4 comments:

Mencken said...

Not to mention the 5,000 black soldiers who fought against the British during the Revolutionary War, the Buffalo Soldiers who fought during and served after the Civil War, and of course the Tuskegee Airman of WWII.

Buchanan was drafted but was classified as 4-F for reactive arthritis which for some odd reason didn't prevent him from serving in the ROTC.

JLM said...

Wasn't aware of Buchanan's 4-F status. Not surprised that he's a member of the Chickenhawk Society.

Mencken said...

Buchanan states in the Introduction that America is no longer a nation, defined as "a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, [and] share the same music, poetry, art, literature."

Either you buy into to this ignorant, glossy definition or you don't. White Power, White Pride Pat.

David Hess said...

If Buchanan's point is to Boer-ize the GOP, more power to him. That leaves all the rest of Americans of all colors and origins to the Democrats. As for those "true-bloods" who spilled blood over the past two centuries in defense of the American Way, you'd need a kaleidoscope to describe them: white, black, brown, bronze, yellow and shades in between. A fellow once asked me about my pedigree and I told him I was a typical American mutt: German, Irish, Scottish and a dash of American Indian (my great-great-grandmother, Lucy, a Seneca).