Pat Buchanan Is A Racist Asshole

As long as Buchanan is penning racist screeds like this current one at Townhall, I just have to ask that eternal, perpetual question: how much longer will NBC and MSNBC continue to shred their credibility as legitimate news organizations by using him as an expert?

What’s particularly galling about Buchanan’s current Townhall column is that he actually quotes Steve Sailer and Dr. Robert Weissberg, both contributors to the anti-immigrant VDARE.com (identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center). Both men promote in their writings the idea that Hispanics and African Americans are by virtue of their very DNA less intelligent than whites and Asians; Weissberg devoted an entire book (Bad Students, Not Bad Schools) to that idea. I don’t know about you, but where I come from that’s pretty blatantly racist.

Yet Buchanan quotes generously from both men, without bothering to mention the controversial and racist nature of their writings. Indeed, he quotes these racist assholes as legitimate scholars. For example:

"America's educational woes reflect our demographic mix of students. Today's schools are filled with millions of youngsters, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants struggling with English plus millions of others of mediocre intellectual ability disdaining academic achievement."

In the public and parochial schools of the 1940s and 1950s, kids were pushed to the limits of their ability, then pushed harder. And when they stopped learning, they were pushed out the door.

Writes Weissberg: "To be grossly politically incorrect, most of America's educational woes vanish if these indifferent, troublesome students left when they had absorbed as much as they were going to learn and were replaced by learning-hungry students from Korea, Japan, India, Russia, Africa and the Caribbean."

”Politically incorrect?” That’s not politically incorrect. It’s racist, bigoted and wrong. It ignores economic disparities, disparities between urban inner city schools and white suburban schools, and institutional roadblocks which oppress the poor and economically disadvantaged. It ignores the achievement of tens of thousands of people of color who have reached the highest levels of American society, despite insurmountable odds -- including, let me point out, the sitting president of the United States and some notable Supreme Court justices.

There’s this thing conservatives have about “political correctness” as if it’s some kind liberal plot designed to trip them up; conservatives just want to hew to some basic facts about the world, which we dirty libs are in deep denial about. The conservatives I know rail against “political correctness” with a missionary zeal. But this isn’t about political correctness, it’s about your facts just being wrong. Blacks and Hispanics are not less intelligent than whites, no matter how you may wish it were so. No, things weren't so much awesomer in the 1940s and 1950s, when "those people" knew their place, no matter how much Pat Buchanan thinks it's so. And no matter how many columns Pat Buchanan pens saying if only we kicked the brown people out of our schools America’s test scores would soar it won’t change the basic fact that test scores are the way they are because of institutional and systemic reasons, not biological or genetic. You know, those same institutional and systemic barriers which were firmly in place in the storied 1940s and 1950s which Buchanan and his ilk look back upon with such nostalgia.

I'm just really sick of this shit. I'm sick of conservatives kicking immigrants in the shins, over and over again. Just fucking stop it already. And I'm sick of powerful news networks like NBC and MSNBC promoting the racist assholes who are doing the kicking. Cut it out. Enough.

We’ve all known Pat Buchanan is a racist asshole. We’ve all wondered why NBC and MSNBC continue to promote him as some kind of “reasonable” conservative. This latest column is just another in a long stream of bigoted screeds from NBC’s go-to conservative voice. I get that. But honestly, how much longer are we going to be saddled with this crap? When are we going to stand up and say, America is better than this?

Buchanan is peddling racism and intolerance and he’s using crackpot junk science from known bigots to support his views. No legitimate news outfit would ever make Lyndon Larouche a regular pundit, yet Pat Buchanan spouts the same hateful views and he’s on both networks regularly. It's just not cute anymore. We're heading into 2011, folks -- you've still got some old crank on your network spouting 18th century ideas? I'm just really fucking tired of it.

Hate is not okay. Bigotry is not okay. Racism is not okay. And as long as MSNBC and NBC pay Pat Buchanan to appear on their news shows, they are promoting this intolerance.

Really, it’s appalling. Time to say: no more.

Pundit FAIL

Andrea Mitchell on "Morning Joe" just now:

"President Obama never met one-on-one with Mitch McConnell."

August 4, 2010:



This is the "liberal" MSNBC. Someone make this shit stop. Just ..... shut the fuck up if you don't know what you're talking about.

Moving The Bar

This morning on MSNBC I heard Tripp Baird, a “Republican strategist,” say that if there’s a “bipartisan” healthcare bill supported by Olympia Snowe, “it’s not really bipartisan.”

Jeebus.

So now, according to a “Republican strategist,” a healthcare bill with the support of a moderate Republican isn’t bipartisan. Well, Sen. Snowe, you might as well just leave the Republican Party right now because, apparently, they’ve just dumped you. Your vote doesn’t count in the “bipartisan” score-keeping.

Is anyone in the Democratic Party paying attention to this crap? In the quest for the Holy Grail of “bipartisanship,” that elusive pot of gold at the end of the political rainbow, the Republicans keep moving the bar. In other words, Democrats, you are tilting at windmills. It will never happen.

There will never be a “bipartisan” bill because the Republican Party does not want healthcare reform, period. They keep moving the bar. Now, for something to be “bipartisan” it has to have the support of the fringe wackos who will never, ever support Democratic Party policies because their entire raison d’etre is to oppose the Democratic Party. Are you following me here?

The fringe wackos think President Obama will put his voodoo laser-lock mind-magic on school children, turning them into Socialist zombies in a 20 minute speech. The fringe wackos think President Obama isn’t really a citizen and therefore is illegitimate. The fringe wackos believe a government-backed option competing alongside private health insurance is somehow government control over your healthcare.

You want “bipartisanship” with these folks? No, I don't think so.

Monica Novotny asked Baird if there was any healthcare bill the Republicans would support. Baird basically said no. Insurance co-ops, he said, are basically “public option light.” Olympia Snowe’s support isn’t really bipartisan.

In other words, there simply will not be any Republican support for healthcare reform. They’ve been asked and their answer is “NO!”

I hope the Democrats are listening.

Your Liberal Media

[UPDATE]:

Joe Klein on the “Real America”:

Sarah Palin's political future will be crippled by her inability to speak to that America, as will the Republican Party's, so long as it scorns diversity and "cosmopolitan" sensibilities--as Rudy Guiliani, of all people, did at the GOP Convention last summer. The attempts to plaster over this glaring deficiency by putting people like Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal front and center are, to coin a phrase, like putting lipstick on a pig.

Indeed. And cosmopolitan urban elites like Mika need to quite apologizing for who they are and where they come from, as if growing up in New York City and Washington D.C. is somehow not “real America.”

-------------------------

Apparently, “real Americans” are those people who agree with Sarah Palin and her “conservative views.”

Those who don’t support Sarah Palin are “elites” who live in liberal cities. Also, too, they are not “real Americans.” And such as.

If this nonsense came from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Bill O’Reilly it wouldn’t merit a post. But it didn’t.

It came from Mika Emilie Leonia Brzezinski, an expert on “real Americans” by virtue of being the daughter of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski . Her mother is the grandniece of Czechoslovakian ex-president Edvard Beneš.

I think someone is feeling a little defensive about her pedigree, don't you?

Brzezinski , of course, is co-host of Morning Joe on the “liberal” cable news network MSNBC. And this is why I no longer watch cable news. I thought newsbots like Mika learned their lesson about "real America" during the election. Sadly, no.

Watch and weep:



(h/t, Atrios)

Tortured Arguments

Liz Cheney tries to defend the indefensible, and it’s painful to watch. There’s so much wrong with this clip, it’s hard to know where to start. Really, the whole thing is just awful.

Watch it:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I feel sorry for Eugene Robinson, who at one point seems to throw up his hands because Liz Cheney isn't making any sense. She's still living in some wingnut post 9/11 fantasyland, Eugene. Reality does not live there.

One of the worst aaaargh moments starts at 10:45 when Liz Cheney makes what I call the “24” argument. Here’s my written transcription, if you don’t have the time--or blood pressure--to watch the whole clip:

Liz Cheney: Eugene let me ask you a question then. So, if you knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had information about an imminent threat on the United States. Information that would result in the death of your family members and the death of the people you care about and love, and that if he were waterboarded you would be able to get that information and prevent the attack, you wouldn’t do it? You’d let him go ahead and launch the attack?

Eugene Robinson: How would I even know that?

LC: That’s exactly the situation these folks were in. That’s the choice you’ve got to make.

I put the word “if” in bold face because it seems quite obvious to me that when your entire argument is predicated on an “if” situation, you’ve lost the debate.

The reality is, we weren’t in that situation, not one terror plot was uncovered by torture, but we got plenty of false information:

Libi was captured fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001, and he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration. He became the unnamed source, according to Senate investigators, behind Bush administration claims in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda operatives. The claim was most famously delivered by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his address to the United Nations in February 2003.

Powell later called the speech a "blot" on his record, saying he was not given all available intelligence and analysis within the government. The Defense Intelligence Agency and some analysts at the CIA had questioned the veracity of Libi's testimony, which was obtained after the prisoner was transferred to Egyptian custody for questioning by the CIA, according to Senate investigators.

In their book "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," Michael Isikoff and David Corn said Libi made up the story about Iraqi training after he was beaten and subjected to a "mock burial" by his Egyptian interrogators, who put him in a cramped box for 17 hours. Libi recanted the story after being returned to CIA custody in 2004.

(Hat tip to Attaturk for that link, BTW.) This is the whole problem with torture as an interrogation technique: besides being immoral, it’s simply ineffective because the information obtained is always unreliable.

But I’m not sure efficacy was the point. I am starting to fear that obtaining a certain kind of information, accuracy be damned, might have been the point all along. But Bush-Cheney got their pet war, KBR and Blackwater got their lucrative government contracts, and Liz and Dick Cheney can continue to flog 9/11-related fear mongering, because without fear, the Republicans have got nothing.

No Cramer v. Stewart On MSNBC

[UPDATE]:

The CEO of TheStreet.com has abruptly quit. This is the online outlet which two years ago aired webcasts of Jim Cramer explaining how he manipulated the markets when he was a hedge fund manager.

Methinks someone is nervous, which explains Cramer’s bizarre appearance on TDS last night.

--------------------------------------

It appears I was not the only one speculating that Jim Cramer’s appearance on Jon Stewart’s show last night was being ignored:

MSNBC Producers Asked Not To Highlight Cramer/Stewart

A TVNewser tipster tells us MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today. In fact, the only time it came up on MSNBC was during the White House briefing, when a member of the press corps asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs if Pres. Obama watched. Gibbs wasn't sure if the president had, but Gibbs did. "I enjoyed it thoroughly," the Press Secretary said.

I haven’t been around the TV much today but I didn’t see the story come up at all on MSNBC this morning.

This just proves what we’ve been saying all along: it’s not that the news media is too liberal or too conservative. It’s that you’re incompetent. Last night someone said the emperor has no clothes, and today the emperor is refusing to talk about it. And it's, you know, his job to talk about it.

Shocking.

I’ll Have What He’s Smoking, Please

Hearing Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson crowing about how “President Bush was right, the surge worked, everyone else was wrong” on MSNBC this morning was surreal. Everyone forgets the entire point of the surge was to “create breathing room” for political solutions.

Remember that? Remember "breathing room"?

So pay no attention to the thwarted military coup in Iraq:

BAGHDAD — Up to 35 officials in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior ranking as high as general have been arrested over the past three days with some of them accused of quietly working to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, according to senior security officials in Baghdad.

The arrests, confirmed by officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security as well as the prime minister’s office, included four generals. The officials also said that the arrests had come at the hand of an elite counterterrorism force that reports directly to the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Pay no attention to the descent into shoe-throwing chaos, inspired by the defiant act of one journalist.

Pay no attention to the bombings in Kirkuk:

They knew that the restaurant would be packed with families, women and children - But collateral damages are to be expected - after all, it is a war. A vicious war of interests, of politics and supremacy.

The room was a shambles. On the flood was a mass of tortured humanity – those that lived.

Prams and pacifiers; ribbons and toys.

Purses thrown open with make up and perfume bottles strewn everywhere. I can see them with my mind's eye. They look much like what my daughter carries in her purse…My daughter, your daughter…anyone's daughter.

And now we hear that Iraq may need American troops in Iraq for ten years to come - To fight the insurgency.

Sure, the surge has been a, pardon the pun, “smashing” success.

Keep telling yourselves that. I realize you need to polish Bush’s legacy to clear the way for Jeb but maybe you should wait for the bombings to actually stop first. Just a thought.

Media Bashing For A New Century

Bless their hearts. The “media elites” can’t catch a break--not from the Republican Party, and not from liberals.

The so-called “liberal media” (and I can’t even type those words with a straight face) got quite a drubbing at the Republican National Convention last week -- so much, in fact, that it sparked this hilarious video featuring the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank as the face of the “Eastern media elite.” If you haven’t seen it, check it out. It’s hilarious.

In yesterday’s New York Times Mark Leibovich addressed the GOP’s media bashing, correctly pointing out that it’s SOP for Republican candidates to blame “the liberal media.” This is true, and it’s not just politicians who like to portray themselves as a poor, oppressed minority unfairly battered by a biased press. I hear that line from conservatives all the time. They just haven’t owned up to the fact that truth has a well-known liberal bias.

But it works, for some bizarre reason. They circled the wagons and cried foul when the New York Times uncovered John McCain’s relationship with a Washington lobbyist, then cried foul when the Times didn’t cover the stalkerazzi lying in wait to nail a trysting John Edwards, who wasn't even a candidate any longer. Hello?

It’s okay for Ron Fournier, who is directing the political coverage of the Associated Press this election, to have been in consideration for a job on the McCain campaign. It’s not okay for Keith Olbermann to make his views known. In fact, Olbermann has been bumped from the anchor chair on election night, to appease the WATBs on the right:

The McCain campaign has filed letters of complaint to the news division about its coverage and openly tied MSNBC to it. Tension between the network and the campaign hit an apex the day Mr. McCain announced Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. MSNBC had reported Friday morning that Ms. Palin’s plane was enroute to the announcement and she was likely the pick. But McCain campaign officials warned the network off, with one official going so far as to say that all of the candidates on the short list were on their way — which MSNBC then reported.

“The fact that it was reported in real time was very embarrassing,” said a senior MSNBC official. “We were told, ‘No, it’s not Sarah Palin and you don’t know who it is.’ ”

Whaaah!!!! Reporters doing their jobs instead of taking talking points and press releases from the campaigns! Must stop! Must stop now!


Tell it to Fox News, assholes.

Unfortunately, there are some legitimate issues with our media elites, which those in the media themselves don’t seem to recognize. It’s what folks like Digby and Atrios refer to as “The Village,” the insulated bubble in which those who hold power and the media that is supposed to be covering them exist. We saw it when John McCain hosted the media at a chummy barbecue--and was rewarded with such glowing verbiage as “grillmaster” and “all-American dad.” We were horrified when the AP’s Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti greeted John McCain with that box of donuts at a luncheon. Barack Obama was likened to a terrorist. No donuts for you, black man!

Is it political bias or personal bias? The Washington press corpse, as we call it, is all about access and cocktail parties. It’s really hard to objectively cover a subject whom you’re playing golf with tomorrow.

Here's what I mean: Buried in Leibovich’s story, where he defends the press against charges of liberal bias, is this tidbit:

At the last Republican National Convention, in New York City, Mr. McCain hosted 50-or-so media A-listers to a 68th-birthday party for himself at La Goulue on Madison Avenue. The guest list included network anchors, network news executives, Sunday talk show hosts and a lot of other media types who all qualify as Kind of a Big Deal. Mr. McCain proposed a hearty and gracious toast to his guests that night, raising his glass to “my base.”

This kind of chummy cliquishness is what bothers me. It’s not liberal-vs-conservative, it’s insider-vs-outsider. The anchors and Washington powerful put on a good show for the 6 o’clock news, then everyone goes out for cocktails afterwards. Meanwhile, Amy Goodman and two Democracy Now! staffers are arrested at the Republican National Convention for covering protestors. That’s some free speech for ya.

I wrote about this a long time ago in a post called Real Deep Memory Hole. I dug up an old Rolling Stone column from 1972 which criticized the media’s deference toward candidate Richard Nixon while burying stories about George McGovern. Replace the word “newspaper” with “mainstream media” and you have a pretty accurate portrait of where we are today:

Newspapers, as A.J. Liebling explained in The Press, are neither public servants nor custodians of the Holy Grail.

They are private enterprises in a capitalist economy whose primary function is to make money. Just like a department store or a gas station.

They are not in the business of truth and honesty and the public good unless the owner of the paper sees that as a way to making money.

The other thing to understand about newspapers is that they are owned by rich people and rich people are, by and large, Republicans.

So when your friendly neighborhood newspaper dumps on McGovern, runs his campaign news inside the paper and spreads the latest bullshit about Nixon’s runaway lead in the polls all over page one, remember that Republicans own the newspapers. As Liebling once noted, Democrats only work there.

Thirty-five years later, what has changed? As I wrote then, it’s gotten worse:

Because rich Republican families no longer own the newspapers. Rich Republican corporations do--corporations which make their money from things like (in the case of GE, which owns 80% of NBC Universal), defense contracts.

Will the internet change things? Will talk radio? Probably not. Corporations have infiltrated every level of political process. Corporations exist solely to make money. And the media that could protect us from this creeping tyranny of the corporation is so deeply entrenched in that world, they don't even see the problem. They think it's liberal-vs-conservative; it's not, and don't let them fool you into thinking that. Look deeper.

Follow the money.

I’ve Had Enough

[UPDATE]: Updated MSNBC contact info below. Southern Beale doesn't spend nearly as much time reading "The Hollywood Reporter" as she used to.

Gentlemen:

Watching Ann Coulter spew one nasty personal attack after another on "Hardball" last night turned my stomach. Not because of what she said -- let's face it, Coulter's schtick hasn't changed in years -- but because this hateful brew is what now passes for public discourse in this country. When did these mean-spirited, vindictive smears become acceptable for a legitimate news show like “Hardball”? This is not news, nor even legitimate opinion, it’s theater. It’s mean, intolerant and it’s tearing this country apart.

I’ve had enough. I will no longer participate in a one-sided conversation that serves no purpose except to rile viewers and breed intolerance and anger. You’re hurting America. Stop it.

I urge “Hardball” advertisers to withdraw their support from empty political theatrics such as this. I urge Chris Matthews to find some sense of decency and contribute to the uplifting of the American conversation, not its detriment. Mr. Kaplan Abrams I beg of you, find some sense of civic responsibility and bring it to work with you for a change.

I ask these things as a Christian, as an American, and as a citizen of the world. Stop the hate speech.

It’s time for this nation to come together. You, as sponsors and purveyors of content across the public airwaves, have a responsibility to bring about this change and undo the damage you’ve caused.

Sincerely,

Southern Beale, Nashville, TN

hardball@msnbc.com
phil.griffin@msnbc.com
rick.kaplan@msnbc.com dan.abrams@msnbc.com
ivan.g.seidenberg@verizon.com
bob.ingalls@verizon.com
eric.rabe@verizon.com
cdelvecchio@us.luxottica.com
sodland@officedepot.com
rciavola@officedepot.com
heiner.springer.hs@bayer-ag.de
michael.schade.ms@bayer-ag.de
jay.kolpon.b@bayer.com
don_esmond@toyota.com
pat_pineda@tma.toyota.com

(List compiled by refinish69)