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Stories tagged with “Pat Buchanan

NEWS FLASH

Pat Buchanan Blames ‘Militant Gay Rights Groups,’ ‘People Of Color’ For Pending MSNBC Termination | Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan attacked gay rights and civil rights organizations for pressuring MSNBC network president Phil Griffin to fire him after the release of his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower. The work, which has been roundly condemned, includes chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.” “Look, for a long period of time the hard left, militant gay rights groups, militant — they call themselves civil rights groups, but I’m not sure they’re concerned about civil rights — people of color, Van Jones, these folks and others have been out to get Pat Buchanan off T.V., deny him speeches, get his column canceled,” Buchanan said during a radio interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday. “This has been done for years and years and years and it’s the usual suspects doing the same thing again. But my view is, you write what you believe to be the truth.” Buchanan said he has not received a “formal notification” of his termination from the network, although executives have hinted that he will not return to the airwaves. Listen:

NEWS FLASH

MSNBC Ousts Contributor Pat Buchanan Over Racist Book | Conservative contributor Pat Buchanan’s tenure at MSNBC may have finally come to an end. AP reports that MSNBC president Phil Griffin has indicated the controversial former presidential candidate will not be allowed back on the network after the release of his latest book. “Suicide of a Superpower” has been roundly condemned for its racially-charged content, including chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.” Griffin said, “When Pat was on his book tour, because of the content of the book, I didn’t think it should be part of the national dialogue much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.” As ThinkProgress has reported, Buchanan has a long history of bigotry and has made many offensive statements while in the network’s employ. 275,000 people signed a petition calling on MSNBC to fire him.

NEWS FLASH

275,000 People Want MSNBC To Fire Pat Buchanan | MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan has made a career out of bigotry. His thoughtful contributions include calling gays satanists, praising the Nazis and the KKK, decrying Dr. Martin Luther King as a fraud, and telling African Americans that they should be grateful for slavery. While touring the networks to promote his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, he stopped by a white nationalist radio program The Political Cesspool which was only too happy to advertise his theories. In response, African-American civil rights organization ColorOfChange.org and CREDO Action gathered 275,000 people who are demanding that MSNBC President Phil Griffin fire Buchanan immediately. The ColorOfChange.org petition reads, “Buchanan has a long and consistent history of peddling white supremacist ideology as legitimate political commentary, on your network and elsewhere.” Noting that Buchanan has the right to express his views, the petition says “he’s not entitled to a platform that lets him broadcast bigotry and hate to millions. If MSNBC and NBC want to be seen as trusted, mainstream sources of news and commentary, you need to fire Buchanan now.” Buchanan has not appeared on MSNBC since he began promoting his book on Oct. 22.

NEWS FLASH

Pat Buchanan: Marriage Equality Is ‘Absurd,’ DADT Repeal ‘Indoctrinates’ Soldiers | Salon.com has a selection of excerpts from MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan’s new audio book, Suicide of a Superpower. In the book, Buchanan describes same-sex marriage as an “absurd notion of equality” and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as Congress “imposing San Francisco values” and “indoctrinating recruits, soldiers, and officers into an acceptance of the gay lifestyle.” Listen:

Media

In New Book Decrying ‘Slow Death’ Of White America, Pat Buchanan Warns That Minorities Lower Test Scores

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

Media

Pat Buchanan: Warren Buffett Is A ‘Bit Of A Hot Dog’ Who Should Pay His Secretary’s Taxes

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.

NEWS FLASH

Pat Buchanan Decries Lack Of Affirmative Action For ‘White Males’ | After showing selective concern for the number of white men killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan took his white man’s grievance road show to the Laura Ingraham program today, where he lambasted the Obama administration’s effort to hire more minorities to the civil service. He complained that, if anything, there are too many people of color in the federal bureaucracy as it is. Saying minorities are “inordinately overrepresented” in the civil service, Buchanan said there’s “affirmative action for women, for Hispanics, and for blacks, but none for white males.” The oppressed majority’s numbers “are diminishing, dramatically,” he warned. Listen here:

In fact, racial minorities and women are underrepresented in the federal civil service.

Media

MSNBC Contributor Pat Buchanan’s New Book Includes Chapter Entitled ‘The End of White America’

MSNBC contributor and long-standing bigot Pat Buchanan has a new book coming out called: Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? This upbeat future “best-seller” will hit the shelves in October, but this morning, Politico Playbook provided those waiting with race-baited breath a preview of the wisdom within. Chapter 4, entitled “The End of White America,” lauds:

“[The] radicalization of the working and middle class, such as occurred in the Truman-McCarthy era, during the George Wallace campaigns, and in the anti-amnesty firestorm that killed the Bush-Kennedy-McCain push for a path to citizenship for illegal aliens.”.

To Buchanan — a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans — these “movements” shared a “populist rage” and a “sense that they are losing their country. And they are right.” George Wallace, of course, was the stauchly pro-segregationist former governor of Alabama and presidental candidate, know for his most famous quote: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Other chapters of Buchanan’s book include, “The Death of Christian America,” which explains President Obama’s “campaign to expel Christianity;” and “Demographic Winter,” which links the West’s downfall to the fact that “children are no longer desirable” here.

NEWS FLASH

Pat Buchanan Has A Long History Of Bigotry | Media Matters has put together a lengthy collection of MSNBC correspondent Pat Buchanan’s history of anti-non-white, anti-immigrant, and anti-gay statements. He has called gays and lesbians “poor homosexuals,” “sodomites,” and “pederasts,” “hell-bent on satanism and suicide,” whose “sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but filthy.” He has also described having a same-sex orientation as “an affliction, like alcoholism” and has suggested that marriage equality will result in the downfall of society. Check out the full report.

Media

Pat Buchanan: Norwegian Right-Wing Terrorist ‘Breivik May Be Right’

Today, in a World Net Daily op-ed, failed presidential candidate and conservative pundit Pat Buchanan offers an example of the ethnic bigotry and racial insensitivity that has come to define him.

Offering his take on the horrendous terrorist attacks in Norway, Buchanan joined the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post in arguing that the far-right extremist perpetrator Anders Breivik may have had a valid point. Arguing that Breivik was bringing attention to his cause, “a Crusader’s war between the real Europe and the ‘cultural Marxists’ and Muslims,” Buchanan declares that, on the “climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world…Breivik may be right“:

But, awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.

That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists.

Europe faces today an authentic and historic crisis.

With her native-born populations aging, shrinking and dying, Europe’s nations have not discovered how to maintain their prosperity without immigrants. Yet the immigrants who have come – from the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia – have been slow to learn the language and have failed to attain the educational and occupational levels of Europeans. And the welfare states of Europe are breaking under the burden.[...]

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.

The sad reality is that Buchanan helps mainstream anti-Muslim intolerance. A regular MSNBC contributor and frequent guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Buchanan once invoked the Nazis’ attempt to march in Skokie, Illinois as an argument against the Islamic Center proposal in New York. He also used this platform to defend Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) “McCarthyesque hearings” on the threat of terrorism from American Muslims, saying American Muslims are “most susceptible or vulnerable to the recruitment” by terrorists who will “radicalize them and make them enemies of America.”

Of course, Muslims are just the most recent group of people on Buchanan’s enemies list, which already includes Latinos, African-Americans, and gay people. As Buchanan said, he “prefers the old bigotry.” And he’s bringing it back to the mainstream.

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