A Little Slice Of Turkey

I don't want war! All I want is peace...peace...peace...!
A little piece of Poland,
A little piece of France,
A little piece of Austria
And Hungary, perchance!
A little slice of Turkey
And all that that entails,
And then a bit of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales!"

-Mel Brooks, To Be Or Not To Be

I guess the news peg for this is the anniversary of the start of WWII in September 1939, but Pat Buchanan has gone ahead and apologized for Hitler, claiming he sought no empire or wider war with Europe, and had merely benign interests of German unification at heart:

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Matt Yglesias does quick work of the historical inaccuracies - Hitler invaded Russia as soon as he achieved a border with them by conquering Poland. And this is a decent riposte as well - Buchanan seems to expect a crazy person to also be a rational military strategist, and when he's not, searches for alternative explanation ("Hitler couldn't have wanted war because he didn't have enough planes! So it's Britain's fault!").

But I'll take the less dainty approach. In 1939, in a small town called Averduct on the German-Polish border, practically every member of my family was rounded up by Nazi authorities, herded into a local synagogue, and burned alive inside. This would fall in Buchanan's revisionism as part of the supposedly honest and forthright effort by Hitler to annex Danzig and restore the German homeland (hey, Hitler just wanted some Lebensraum - why not let him annex whatever he decided was part of Germany, right? Don't you want to save lives?). But my dead ancestors didn't live in Danzig (now Gdansk). They had nothing to do with such a conflict. Maybe that was the work of a few bad apple Nazis acting alone. That and the other 6 million incidents.

But the bigger point here to be made is that Pat Buchanan is paid by the allegedly liberal cable news network MSNBC, he has been on it for years, if you add up all his appearances throughout the day he probably spends as much time on the air as anyone outside of the Morning Joe crowd, and that's... OK. Calling Hitler misunderstood is not a firing offense at the liberal cable news network MSNBC.

Good to know.

My favorite comment in the Buchanan thread, by the way:

summarex
Great Article Pat.
But what’s your beef with general Pinochet?

Must be a follower of Milton Friedman.

The Bigot In The Room

I saw Pat Buchanan today refer to Frank Ricci as "an American hero" on Hardball. His opponent in the debate, an NAACP lawyer, was measured and calm. But he never brought up what Buchanan wrote just a couple days ago in talking about the GOP's strategy for victory in the future.

In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate's Hispanic vote.

If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent. [...]

Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled. And McCain might be president.

If only John McCain race-baited more, if only Republicans, who have practically nobody but Southern white men left in their party, made MORE overt moves toward Southern white men, then they would receive electoral glory. As Ta-Nehisi Coates says:

There are a couple problems here, I'd submit. One is that Sotomayor isn't black (except in Baltimore.) She's a Latina. Amping up the race-baiting isn't just going to turn off black people (most of whom are already turned-off) it turns off Latinos also.

The second problem is that it likely turns a significant portion of white people also. The GOP's problem isn't that it needs to shore up Alabama--at least not yet. It's problem is, well, basically everywhere else that isn't Alabama. I don't know how bashing Sotomayor makes you more competitive in, say, Colorado or Oregon. I'd assume the opposite.

Altogether, I think this is awful political advice. But it's about what you'd expect from the guy who, as one of Matt's commenters note, told us that Sarah Palin would steal women from Obama. You don't have to be right to do Buchanan's job. Or even sincere. You just have to be very loud.

Pat Buchanan is a bigot. He provides a bigoted viewpoint for hours per day on a supposedly liberal network called MSNBC. Why is that tolerated, like ol' Pat is just a crazy uncle?

...Rachel Maddow is laying into Buchanan right now, it's pretty lively.

Sex and the Single Political Culture

I want you to watch a politician who understands the financial services industry, now the most important factor in returning us to economic growth, and who is at the top of his game discussing how we sold out the manufacturing base of the country while in thrall to that financial services industry, particularly Goldman Sachs, which created artificial paper profits and used their vast political connections to cut the line and receive trillions in handouts when those paper profits went up in smoke. As a result, the banks have rebounded thanks to the intense effort of the federal government, but that money has not flowed through them and into the creation of new productive sectors of the economy that would create jobs.

The only additional piece of information you need is that this particular politician cannot practice politics anymore because he solicited prostitutes, and as a Democrat not named Larry Craig, David Vitter, John Ensign or Mark Sanford, he must resign for a sex-related mistake. Funny how that worked out right at the time that the financial sector was on the verge of melting.



I don't glorify Eliot Spitzer's conduct. But clearly he is virtually the most important politician in America for the times who cannot use his skill and talent because of a personal indiscretion. And this has become a real paradox in America, where personal failings get confused with real and thoroughgoing criminal activity, and the over-moralists in Washington pick and choose which to emphasize. Thus we have a situation where Marcy Wheeler says blowjob on television and everyone in the media runs for the fainting couch, but hours earlier on the same network good ol' boy Pat Buchanan can advocate for murdering a 19 year-old and nobody had any similar reaction, just a shrug of the shoulders and words like "Oh, Pat!"

Our sexual hangups date back to our Puritan ancestry. They will always spark attention and furious twitterings (the offline kind) back and forth. When they get in the way of legitimate investigations into the rule of law and the work of public servants uniquely qualified to fight back against the corporate control of government by the financial industry, they become real barriers to progress. And no matter how many moralizers fall under the spell of passion and fall from their own personal standards, this zing of attention to sex will never cease.

Cue My Eyes Rolling Into The Back Of My Head

The Republicans will trot out Frank Ricci, the firefighter from New Haven, to testify against Sonia Sotomayor at hearings next week. And then we'll all get to hear once again about the poor guy who studied hard - hard! - to pass that promotions test, and then the MAN, in this case represented by a Latina following the established laws on the books which the Supreme Court had to change, knocked him down and took everything he had. He needed that promotion, see, and he was the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority throw out the test because they could have been sued until the Supreme Court changed the law to essentially indemnify them.

The reality of the case doesn't matter, so this will just be a launching pad for a series of "white man's burden" colloquys among Villagers.

Man, the blowhards are going to make me sick next week. Pat Buchanan is probably testing out new slurs as we speak. "Does Sombrero Lady sound pejorative enough? How about Phi Beta Hubcappa?"

Gingrich Concedes The Point; Will Others?

It's very interesting to me that Newt Gingrich dialed down his description of Sonia Sotomayor as a racist, even if, in context, he didn't. Surely we know how this works - we saw it last week with the President. Obama took one step back on Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment, conceding the point but also set it in context, but it set off a flurry from the commentariat, claiming that Obama "caved," etc. Now Gingrich does essentially the same thing, conceding the point but adding a whole bunch of context actually keeping his claim alive that Sotomayor is a racist. And while this gives Republicans space to welcome the return of civility to the debate, it keeps them on the defensive and in a reactive position as well. Clearly calling Sotomayor a racist wasn't exactly working out for them, so they had to defuse that. But the backpedaling is historically the kind of thing Republicans NEVER do. Could they be understanding the damaging nature of their rhetoric?

Of course, Gingrich isn't alone, and there are plenty of other ways for Democrats to continue to exploit this and put the pressure on. In fact, Gingrich's admission, despite its fatuousness, gives them more ammunition - "even Newt Gingrich disavowed this," etc. For example, will Republicans be made to answer for Pat Buchanan's comparison of Sotomayor to white supremacists? In the distant past, Buchanan was a symbol for a particular strain of xenophobic ugliness. Now he's a respected member of the media community and that "liberal" network MSNBC. Will he be held to account?

Given Pat Buchanan's history of clear bigotry - most recently demonstrated in his reminder last night that he supported and continues to defend a white supremacist - there really isn't any good reason for MSNBC to continue putting him on the air. The man is a bigot, plain and simple. In light of the hot water MSNBC has gotten into in the past for bigoted comments by its employees, you would think they would want to distance themselves from the likes Buchanan.

But what's really extraordinary is that MSNBC brings Buchanan on air to talk about race issues. It gives Pat Buchanan a platform from which to call other people racists. Granted, if there's someone who knows racists better than Pat Buchanan does, I can't think of who it would be. But his is not the kind of expertise MSNBC should be inflicting upon its viewers.

...by the way, this is completely divorced from the larger debate over Sotomayor's confirmation, which is assured. The "fight" is a bit of a shadow play for the base. But conceding the point doesn't help that cause.

...the Chairman of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, won't retract the racism charge. Wedge away, Democrats.

...This also brings up a larger question about that liberal network MSNBC. Giving space to an out-and-out bigot like Pat Buchanan, who's on that channel more often than the peacock, reflects really poorly on them. Not to mention the three hours of unadulterated horseshit in the morning.

The Morning Joe crew was on an anti-union tear this morning, claiming the union label on a company means "sell." Mika Brzezinski went so far as to say of unions: "They cripple the system that makes a company work." Collectively, the journalists on Morning Joe couldn't name a single "successful" unionized company.

This says more about their qualifications to discuss public policy and labor relations than it says about unions. To pick just one obvious example, UPS is unionized -- and the company made more than $3 billion last year. That's "billion" with a "b," and those are profits, not revenues.

Oh, what the heck, let's take one more example. GE is one of the world's largest companies; in 2006, its revenues were greater than the gross domestic products of 80 percent of UN nations. The company made more than $18 billion in 2008 -- again, billion with a b, and again, those are profits, not revenue. All that despite (or, perhaps, because of) the fact that 13 different unions represent GE workers.

Oh, and GE owns NBC-Universal, which owns MSNBC, which pays Joe Scarborough a handsome salary (and the unionized workers who help get his show on the air considerably less.)

Scarborough, you recall, is the former GOP Congressman who represented Michael Griffin pro bono, the man who killed abortion provider Dr. David Gunn, in his murder case.

"I am not a racialist, but, und this is a big but..."

(Title from an obscure Monty Python sketch)

The Sotomayor debate continues to reveal the absolute worst of human nature, driven by conservative white men with serious issues over race. Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan, two of the biggest loudmouths in this debate, share an aide who plead guilty to karate chopping a pedestrian and calling her the N word. For his part, Buchanan called the Supreme Court nominee a quota queen who practices "race-based justice," basing this on a quote and none of the facts of her record (in Ricci she was bound by the law and precedent, and quotas had nothing to do with it, as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out to him today). Does everyone remember when Pat Buchanan was radioactive to the party and brought down George W. Bush's hopes in 1992? Now he's on the "liberal" MSNBC more than the peacock.

And now there's a new player in this debate, Manuel Miranda, who you may remember from stealing Democratic files when he was working for Bill Frist. Within the space of a few hours today, he basically called Mitch McConnell gay for resisting a filibuster for Sotomayor, and then he slandered all African-Americans.

Today, Miranda did a conference call with conservative bloggers organized by the Heritage foundation, where he discussed Sotomayor. Asked how Republicans could oppose her while avoiding charges of racism, Miranda said they had to wage substantive attacks. Then he segued into a discussion of the views of Hispanics on issues, saying:

“By the way, Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African Americans. We think just like everybody else.”

The audio is here; the key bit starts at around the 42 minute mark.

To be clear, Miranda didn’t appear to be saying that African Americans are unlike everyone else in that they don’t think. He seemed to be saying that everyone, including Hispanics, thinks one way on issues, and African Americans think another way. Perhaps Miranda meant otherwise, but this seems clumsy or wacky at best and seems to crudely isolate African Americans as a political group.

Not like those dirty African-Americans, you see.

This is just a disaster for the GOP, and it gets worse and worse.

White Man's Burden

The old crazy uncles that the GOP would rather keep in the basement have all burst to the surface, and the craziest of the crazy if Tom Tancredo. His assertion that the National Council of La Raza is "the Latino KKK" not only offends that organization and all Hispanics, but members of the GOP who have appeared at NCLR events and accepted their awards. We truly are seeing the crackup of the white male conservatives.

African-American and Hispanic conservatives who have questioned her judicial philosophy also note the historic nature of the appointment and praise her triumph over economic hardship. White conservatives, on the other hand, have been far more personal and aggressive in their attacks on Sotomayor's record, repeatedly accusing her of "reverse racism" and questioning her intelligence.

White male conservatives, despite polling showing both the public and GOP insiders disagree, are maintaining that Sotomayor is an unqualified bigot.

Pat Buchanan described Sotomayor in a column Friday as an "anti-white liberal judicial activist" as well as a "lightweight" who "covers up her intellectual inadequacy by bullying from the bench."

John Derbyshire, at National Review Online, took admiration for Sotomayor's life story as an intentional insult to him and all other white people:

I get mighty annoyed by the unspoken implication in a lot of commentary that anyone not a member of a Protected Minority must have grown up in a twelve-bedroom lakeside mansion and been chauffered off to prep school with a silver spoon in his mouth. Judge Sotomayor was raised in public housing? So was I. Her mother was a nurse working late shifts? So was mine. When did white working poor people disappear off the face of the earth? Where are the eager listeners to their "compelling stories"?

There's lots more at the link, including Billo chiming in with how "the left sees the white man as a problem." As a white man, I can say pretty directly that I don't. No, but what does seem to be the case is that the right, in particular the white male conservative right, can't stand that their coded attacks aren't working anymore. They have used this playbook for decades, mostly with success, and now the country has changed, gotten more diverse, more interconnected, more tolerant, and they don't know what the hell to do.

Some people, mainly the ones in charge of electing Republicans, have recognized this. But the loudest members of the party, the media hounds, haven't, and they still think they can call Sotomayor a "reverse racist" or a "twofer" and reap the rewards. And when it falls flat, now that the worm has turned, they figure, this all must be because everyone hates whitey.

Funny, several years ago the Democrats rejecting Miguel Estrada as a circuit court judge was supposed to ruin their relationship with Hispanic voters. But there's a difference between rejecting a conservative judge who happens to be Hispanic and rejecting a Hispanic woman who happens to be a judge. They've foregrounded the race and gender attacks, and this side of the GOP is simply ugly to watch.

This Is Going To Be The Most Awesome General Election Ever

On sale at the Texas Republican Convention:



(h/t Open Left)

It's certainly more direct than Pat Buchanan claiming Obama is exotic.

Somehow the Washington Post thinks that it's only China where there is a "fascination" with Obama's skin color. It's not being used as an electoral strategy by a political party in the United States or anything.

Ranters and Idiots

Pat Buchanan's racist editorial, basically saying that black America should thank this country for all the greatness (like slavery, Jim Crow, and locking up 1 out of every 9 of its young men) it has bestowed upon them, is just another sad chapter in a sad old racist man's life. But the fact that he gets an almost-daily platform on MSNBC to spout nonsense and garbage like this, without anyone batting an eyelash, is shocking. The same with the fact that John Yoo is allowed to write anywhere, especially on the topic of THE US CONSTITUTION, in any publication in the country. They just recycle these discredited individuals over and over. Nobody is ever marginalized to the point that they cannot resurface.

That the 2008 Democratic nominee for president will be chosen by individuals no one voted for in the primaries flew for too long under the commentariat's radar. This from the party that litigated to "make every vote count" in the 2000 Florida recount, reviled the institution of the Electoral College for letting the loser of the national popular election win the presidency, and has called the Bush administration illegitimate ever since [...]

This delegate dissonance wasn't anything the Framers of the U.S. Constitution dreamed up. They believed that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea. Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become a mere servant of the legislature. They had the record of revolutionary America to go on. All but one of America's first state constitutions gave state assemblies the power to choose the governor. James Madison commented that this structure allowed legislatures to turn governors into "little more than ciphers."

You know what the Framers didn't dream up? Torture as official US policy. They actually had the direct election of Senators as a kind of "superdelegates" and didn't want anyone but male landowners to have the right to vote, so Yoo is completely wrong on that point. But the man who assaulted the Constitution and debased all of our souls doesn't get a chance to say ANYTHING about the intentions of the Framers. It's vomit-inducing.

The Disease of Racial Bigotry

Lou Dobbs was called out in the New York Times for flat-out making up statistics about undocumented immigrants being responsible for an increase in leprosy, and accepting the "research" of white supremacists as truth, and the only thing shocking about this is that it doesn't happen more often. By the way, Dobbs gave a weaselly and self-serving answer to this criticism.

But when asked about this on Scarborough Country, Pat Buchanan agreed with the discredited Dobbs, and went even further, blaming the case of the man with the extreme strain of tuberculosis on... yep, on immigration.

BUCHANAN: Well, this is a serious problem because he‘s got what‘s called multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, Joe. Something like 60 percent of them die. It costs $200,000 to $1.2 million to treat folk with this. But let me tell you, it underscores a larger problem. TB is back in the United States primarily because of mass illegal immigration, folks who have got poor hygiene, poor health services in their country, walk across the border. Many of them don‘t know they got it. Out in Prince William County in Virginia, in my book, it‘s got a 188 percent increase in TB. Immigrant kids are 100 times as likely as an American kid to be carrying tuberculosis.

SCARBOROUGH: Now, Pat, let me stop you right there, and let me ask you this question...

BUCHANAN: Sure.

SCARBOROUGH: ... because Lou Dobbs has gotten in trouble talking about leprosy and all these other issues.

BUCHANAN: He‘s right about leprosy! I can give you the numbers!

Of course, this is a very familiar line of argument, the idea that immigrants are somehow dirty and diseased, that they are polluting white culture, that they breed like animals and create sickness. David Neiwart discussed this a couple years ago.

All this has a familiar ring to students of American history. The very same kind of associations -- equating immigrants with pestilence -- were part and parcel of previous nativist outbreaks in the United States, particularly those in which the targets were Asians. Here's an excerpt from Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer's The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1991, University of Illinois Press), pp. 37-38:
In addition to the stench, filth, crowding, and general dilapidation with which Chinatown was accused of afflicting the community, another serious charge was made that the Chinese were introducing foreign diseases among the whites. For instance, it was claimed by both civil and medical authorities that Chinese men and women were afflicted with venereal disease to an uncommon degree. The Chinese prostitutes were accused of luring young boys into their houses and of infecting them with the disease. A medical journal charged that the blood stream of the Anglo-Saxon population was being poisoned through the American men who, "by thousands nightly," visited these resorts. A cause of rather frequent concern to the officials were outbreaks of smallpox. The Chinese were suspected as the source of the disease, since cases appeared among them while they were still on shipboard. They were condemned especially for not reporting their cases of the disease. "It [Chinatown] is almost invariably the seed-bed of smallpox, whence the scourge is sent abroad into the city.

The most exciting charge under this head, however, was that the Chinese were introducing leprosy into California. The very strangeness of the disease made this charge all the more ominous. It was claimed that wherever Chinese coolies had gone leprosy had developed, and that purchasers of Chinese goods were likely to contract the disease. Dr. Charles C. O'Donnell, a politically minded physician, discovered a case in a Chinese warehouse, placed him in an express wagon and drove through the streets, haranguing the crowds on the street corners concerning the dangers to which the community was being exposed. The contention of some physicians that it was not real leprosy but rather a "sporadic case of elephantitis" did not help matters a great deal. During a period of less than ten years the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco arranged for the deportation of forty-eight cases [...]

There is no small irony in all this, of course. Because racial bigotry is like a virus, too. Given the proper iteration -- especially by disguising itself as part of the discourse over the "war on terror" -- it can quickly spread from the fringes into the mainstream. Of course, it always takes special transmitters, modern-day Typhoid Marys, to do it.

It serves the fearmongers on the far right well to blame increases in disease on the dirty immigrants. Not on a broken health care system that cannot serve the poor, not on the increase in chemical agents in our food. No, it's those filthy wetbacks that get all dirty by rolling in the mud and swimming across the Rio Grande. This is a classic technique to scare Americans, going back centuries. It's not provable, any more than any statistics are about immigrants forced to live in the shadows (they don't willingly show up for a lot of polls). And to his credit, Joe Scarborough asked Buchanan for documentation of his crazy claims, to which Buchanan simply blustered and shouted. But the fact that it's not provable HELPS the propagandists who want to find scapegoats for the nation's ills. It's not possible to verify these charges, but it's also not possible to not verify them.

Buchanan, Dobbs, and the others who try to scare Americans by intimating that they and their children can get sick and die if more immigrants are allowed in the country are simply following a common script. Demonizing the other means that you don't have to engage with the issue. You can just refer to the problem in the way you would refer to a bug that must be stamped out. This is the language of white supremacism, and it will lead to more hate crimes, as people take action on this kind of ugly rhetoric.