Yesterday, Pat Buchanan announced that his tenure as a commentator at MSNBC was finally over, ending months of speculation about his absence from his once-frequent perch aside morning anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

Calls for Buchanan’s firing by groups like Color of Change, Credo, and Media Matters had been loud and growing, following years of controversial, offensive and outright bigoted statements made by Buchanan without apology or remorse. Here is a look back at 10 of the most offensive and outrageous statements made by Pat Buchanan:

1. Wanted to close the borders to protect white dominance. As he wrote in his 2006 book State of Emergency: “If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built.”

2. Blamed lower test scores on minorities. In his most recent book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, he blames minorities for dragging down the country’s test scores. “[T]he decline in academic test scores here at home and in international competition is likely to continue, as more and more of the children taking those tests will be African-American and Hispanic.

3. Claimed Jerry Sandusky’s atrocities are because of “Homosexual marriage.” Buchanan appeared on a right-wing radio show on November 15 to make some convoluted comparisons: “Let’s take this Penn State thing…these horrors, there’s an organization that marches in the gay pride parade in New York called—used to—called the North American Man Boy Love Association, which advocated voluntary sex along the lines of exactly what was going on at Penn State. Many of our political icons have marched in that parade right behind that NAMBLA float […] This is now, homosexual marriage is now the civil rights cause of the decade.”

4. Said the Jewish population in the United States dropped in the 90s because Jews aborted all their babies. Buchanan explains that the decline in the American Jewish population during the 1990s (a decline that a Brandeis study says never occurred), “is a result of the collective decision of Jews themselves. From Betty Friedan to Gloria Steinem in the 1970s to Ruth Bader Ginsburg today, Jewish women have led the battle for abortion rights. The community followed.”

5. Asserted Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people including 69 teens in Norway, “may have been right.” Buchanan called Breivik a coward, evil, and cold-blooded, and then proceeded to defend his twisted rationale for the killings: “As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.”

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Pat Buchanan is, among other things, an MSNBC contributor with a new book out, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? As his “last political will and testament,” the book’s thesis is centered on “cultural collapse” of the nation and “the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation” — namely, white people. In an op-ed for CNS News yesterday, Buchanan outlines the three major consequences America will face without enough white people to save it.

First, the Republican party, which “routinely gets 90 percent of its presidential votes from white America,” will come to an end, especially since crucial GOP states like Texas are “hispanicizing.” Second, the “millions of immigrants, legal and illegal” who “do not bring the academic or professional skills of European-Americans” will replace actual “taxpayers” and suck the government dry. Finally, test-scores will nose-dive because “more and more children taking those tests will be African-American and Hispanic”:

Third, the decline in academic test scores here at home and in international competition is likely to continue, as more and more of the children taking those tests will be African-American and Hispanic. [...] Can the test-score gap be closed? With the Hispanic illegitimacy rate at 51 percent and the black rate having risen to 71 percent, how can their children conceivably arrive at school ready to compete?

Given that minorities are bad at school, Buchanan goes on to warn that the “burden” of academic excellence thus “falls almost entirely on white males.” This is, of course, just the latest attempt of the MSNBC contributor to pass off derogatory, bigoted, and ignorant racialism as analysis. Some low-lights from Buchanan’s long and distinguished history in bigotry: Read more

Since he announced his support for raising taxes on the wealthy, Warren Buffett has become the go-to billionaire boogeyman of the right, receiving a constant flow of personal attacks from conservatives upset that he’s spoken about how his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does thanks to problems with the tax code.

The latest attack came this morning from MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan, who bizarrely suggested that Buffett should pay his secretary’s taxes:

BUCHANAN: I tend to think he’s a bit of a hot dog, Joe. You know, I really want to pay more taxes, and my secretary pays more than I do. Why doesn’t he pay her taxes? And why doesn’t he himself pay at the rate he should be?

Watch it:

Of course, the point Buffett is trying to make when he speaks about his secretary is that there is a fundamental problem with the tax code that lets people like him exploit the system to pay less than middle-class Americans. Host Joe Scarborough and Buchanan sort of make this point, ironically, when they attack Buffett and other “super rich” people for using lawyers and accountants to exploit loopholes to pay less in taxes. As long as the opportunity exists, people will continue to take advantage of it.

Conservative responses like Buchanan’s completely ignore this systemic problem. Volunteering to pay more or paying a secretary’s taxes won’t solve anything. One in four millionaires has a lower tax rate (accounting for federal income and payroll taxes) than the median middle-class households. Buffett’s effective federal tax rate of around 17.4 percent is not unusual for investors at his income level, as Citizens for Tax Justice point out, as the average effective tax for people with $10 million or more in investment income is just over 17 percent. Moreover, tax rates have fallen 25 percent since 1995, when the economy was doing just fine.