Top ten crazy sh*t Pat Buchanan says
Talking to Reverand Al Sharpton this week, But while some became outraged at his comments, they came as no surprise to others more familiar with Buchanan's rich history of bigotry. Below are 10 of his most outrageously bigoted comments on everything from African-Americans to Jews to immigrants to women and beyond.
1. Obama has benefited from being African-American.
First, Buchanan said, "Look, if Barack Obama thinks there‘s no correlation between the fact he‘s an African-American and his career has been so spectacular, he would be as delusional as George W. Bush saying the fact, he‘s president of the United States."
Then he told political analyst, author and blogger Keli Goff, an African American woman, to "shut up." In all fairness he only asked her to shut up "for a second" and added a "please."
2. White People built America
Buchanan gave voice to the voiceless white men, explaining that affirmative action is a way to increase diversity at the expense of downtrodden white males, who he says built this country. "This has been a country built basically by white folks," he said, adding that white people were "90 percent of the entire nation in 1960, when I was growing up." (It was actually 85%.)
3. White people are to the Supreme Court as black people are to Olympic track races
As if the previous clip weren't enough, Buchanan then suggested that white people are just naturally better at being Supreme Court justices, just as "black folks" happen to be the fastest runners: "But if I look at the U.S. track team in the Olympics, and they're all black folks, I don't automatically assume it's discrimination. I will say, "I think maybe those are the fastest guys we got, that maybe they're the fastest guys in the country, maybe they're the fastest in the world."
4. Pedophiles are all gay
When Eleanor Clift asked Buchanan, "Have you renounced and rejected the Catholic priests that have disappointed you over the years?" he responded, "You mean the ones involved in this gay stuff? You're dead right." When John McLaughlin clarified, "Pat, they're not necessarily gay," Pat responded "It's little kids."
But that wasn't his first time conflating gay men and pedophiles. In reference to Mark Foley, the Congressman who sexually harassed several House pages, Pat focused on the real problem -- the fact that this man is a "flamer." Talking to Joe Scarborough, Pat said, "I mean, look, we are now hearing that this flamer, Mr. Foley, was going after kids as early as 19 -- I mean, 20 -- I mean, 1998. I mean, you knew Foley. Did you know he was this kind of flamer who was after pages?"
5. The minorities are "invading"
Buchanan warned MSNBC host Joe Scarborough that "We got an invasion of our country, and you‘re going to lose this country, Joe, if you do not stop this invasion which is altering the character of the country! It‘s turning us basically into what Teddy Roosevelt called a tangle of... of squalling minorities!"
6. Hitler was a genius and the Holocaust is exaggerated
In a column designed to promote his book Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War", Buchanan described Hitler as "an individual of great courage.... Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." Buchanan also openly doubts that Jews were gassed to death in Treblinka, writing that, "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody."
7. AIDS is God's punishment for being gay
In addition to calling gay people "sodomites," Buchanan once wrote, "The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution on the gays." On another occasion, he added that "AIDS is nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature."
8. Women are not discriminated against and housework is liberating
On women, Buchanan wrote: "Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism." And in his book Right from the Beginning Pat added that "The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer."
9. Segregation kept politics from being too polarizing
In Right from the Beginning, Buchanan wrote "There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." But, as Nixon's White House adviser, Buchanan told his boss not to visit Coretta Scott King because it would "outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse.... Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history."
10. Immigrants are killing "us"
On This Week With David Brinkley in 1991, Buchanan said "If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?"
More recently in his book Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart Pat warned "America [Is] Committing Suicide" while "Asian, African, And Latin American Children Come To Inherit The Estate." And this past month, in response to the killings spree in Norway, Pat wrote "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."