Pat Buchanan’s Racist Rantings

by David Safier

I’m wandering away from my usual education postings today. I’ve been waiting to see a recent Pat Buchanan column taken up by the media and hoping to see MSNBC demand an apology and suspend him for a few weeks. I’ve seen nothing, so the least I can do is say something myself.

A week ago, Buchanan wrote a column, Obama’s cure: Same old con, about Obama’s speech on the topic of race. Here are some highlights:

Buchanan said the speech was “the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running,” blaming the whites when they’re the cause of their own problems.

So Obama is a con artist (and maybe a con) and a black hustler shaking down innocent whites, looking for another handout.

“America has been the best country on Earth for black folks.”

Black folks.

“It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”

Brought here in slave ships. A word about the horrors of the middle passage would have been nice, Pat. Introduced to Christian salvation. That’s the kind of attitude we need, a little more paternalistic “Take up the White Man’s Burden” talk.

“No people anywhere have done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the black community into the mainstream.”

I guess, according to Pat, those programs were specifically designed for the black community. No poor whites or Latinos or Asians should bother trying to get any of these government anti-poverty black Welfare Queen funds.

“We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

We do everything for them, and those ungrateful wretches don’t even thank us.

A longer version of this op ed is on Buchanan’s website, titled, A Brief for Whitey. It includes the line:

“Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.”

Pat Buchanan is treated as a serious man. He’s a talking head on MSNBC. He sits next to Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews on election nights. And these racist rants are allowed to stand, without comment and without censure.

Don Imus was thrown off the air, rightly, for referring to the Rutger’s women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos.” MSNBC’s David Schuster was made to apologize, then was suspended for saying Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped around” by the Clinton campaign. Fair enough. But Buchanan compares Obama to a con man and a black hustler, and we hear nothing.

In an exercise in futility, I’ve been emailing Keith Olbermann daily since this happened, trying to shame him into condemning Buchanan’s racism on his show, Countdown. Last night, I heard Bill Maher talking about Buchanan’s column on Real Time with Bill Maher, the first mention I’ve heard on television. By giving Buchanan a pass, the media is saying that using racial slurs and egregious misreadings of racial history against Obama is fine. Bring it on. The more racial slurs, the better.