Video is 16 minutes long, Buchanan comes in around 4:30.
If you've ever wondered what it looks like when a racist is afraid that the 200+ year history of white male dominance in this country is over, check this out. In this fascinating interview, Rachel Maddow keeps her cool while Pat Buchanan rants and foams at the mouth.
Buchanan: I don't think Judge Sotomayor is qualified for the United States Supreme Court. She has not shown any great intellect here or any great depth of knowledge of the Constitution. She's never written anything that I've read in terms of a law review article or a major book or something like that on the law. And I do believe that she's an affirmative action appointment by the President.
Apparently the fact that Sotomayor has more experience on the bench than any currently sitting SCOTUS judge had at their confirmation does not count for much, nor does the fact that she was very rarely overturned during her career by higher courts. Buchanan apparently believes the purpose of affirmative action is to discriminate against white males. He feels that the fact that historically 108 of 110 supreme justices are white males simply reflects the inherently superior abilities of white males.
Buchanan: ...white men were 100% of the people who wrote the Constitution, 100% of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close to 100% of the people who died at Normandy.
His racism blinds him to the contributions of other groups. Where I see a history of disenfranchisement and unfairness he sees the natural order of things. Buchanan unfairly dismisses all of Sotomayor's qualifications as the product of affirmative action. Maddow asks if Buchanan sees the nomination of a latina to the SCOTUS as a positive thing for this country and he dodges the question.
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I think Pat needs to watch the movie Glory a couple times before claiming that only white men gave their lives in the American Civil War. The 179,000 Black men who served in the Union army and the additional 19,000 in the navy -- the 40,000 who died and the 16 who were awarded the Medal of Honor -- probably are pissed that white guys are getting all the credit.
ReplyDeleteCrap. I'm going to have to blog about this too.
Pat's probably accurate for his first two statistics. I highly doubt the accuracy of his latter two. It is known that many women served, disguised as men on both sides of the Civil War.
ReplyDeleteIn so far as the men who died on the Normandy coast during World War II: hundreds if not thousands of Americans of Mexican, Latin, AmerIndian, Asian, and Southern and Eastern European descent are known to have died in addittion to the greater thousands of Western European descended. I am quite willing to accept the possibility that a few African-American soldiers may have died at some point during the landings and the latter off-loading operations.
Amy: I am interested in the source for your statistics: those are rather precise and most sources appear reluctant to go into that level of detail.
My statistics on the Civil War are from the website of the National Archives, which I take is a rather credible site.
ReplyDeleteAs for the first two statistics Buchanan offers -- which I just glanced over in my offended defense of minority veterans -- I only now realized that those are totally wrong, too. The signers were white men, yes, but it's pretty well documented how the Iroquois Confederacy contributed to the language of the Declaration and the Preamble. I mean, they didn't help to *write* it; it was theft on the part of the colonists. I'm just saying, John Locke wasn't the only one who was ripped off.