Can someone explain to me what NEW idea in Pat Buchanan’s latest polemic crossed the line, resulting in his dismissal from MSNBC? Because it sounds like it’s just another regurgitation of the same paleoconservative party line he’s peddled for the last 20 years.
Buchanan at The American Conservative, almost crowing about a victory:
My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.
After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.
The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?? A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it “exists to strengthen Black America’s political voice,” claimed that my book espouses a “white supremacist ideology.” Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, “The End of White America.”
That Buchanan has remained a respected figure in our political culture as long as he has is a disgrace. That he is dismissed from MSNBC on the grounds they provide is even more unfortunate. Congratulations MSNBC President Phil Griffin, you’ve done the impossible: making the mean-spirited bully Buchanan now a victim likely to get support he does not deserve.
Pat Buchanan is an antisemite. It’s plain as day. The evidence is too abundant to be dismissed away. Today’s Paleoconservative and Paleolibertarian movements have antisemitism hardwired into their ideological DNA. Read their books and they are entirely open about wanting to revive the conservative tradition that opposed US engagement in World War II and even sympathized with the Nazis.
In their bones paleoconservatives like Buchanan are in line with the antisemitism of Father Charles Coughlin. Buchanan has even slipped up and confessed it. Consider this revealing exchange with Wolf Blitzer in 2004 in which he defends using the racist, anti-Jewish caricature of Fagin to smear Richard Perle:
BLITZER: Did you think of the Jewish line of Fagan [sic] when you wrote that and Richard Perle being Jewish?
BUCHANAN: Well, I mean, obviously Fagan was Jewish. But the thing about it is he was a leader of pick-pockets in a fictional book. Why is it unacceptable for me to use a literary allusion when I am called routinely Father Charles Coughlin of the modern era who was alleged to be an anti-Semitic priest? That is an outrage because that’s a real character.
Coughlin was ALLEGED to be an antisemite? This is a man who published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper but Buchanan declares on CNN he was an alleged antisemite?
Update: My friend Jeff Dunetz at Yid with Lid has more examples of Buchanan’s antisemitism, including William F. Buckley, Jr.’s verdict.
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