It’s a shame that Pat Buchanan doesn’t understand the history of the Irish in this country. It’s almost weird how he manages to conflate “Irish” and “white” and “Catholicism” and “Christianity.” His people weren’t really considered white when they got here, and Catholics suffered horrible discrimination in this country until fairly recently. Not ten miles from where I live is a mass grave of over fifty Irish railroad workers who died of cholera in 1832. They were denied medical care and thrown in a ditch. No funerals. No death certificates. No acknowledgment it even happened until 1970.
The America of Pat Buchanan’s imagination never existed. And, I wonder, how long before MSNBC has a moment of conscience and stops putting this bigot on teevee? Here is Joan Walsh, reviewing Pat Buchanan’s new book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?:
The book’s most pernicious chapters seek to “prove” white superiority and black and Latino inferiority, in the U.S. and worldwide. And yet Buchanan’s cult of meritocracy can’t quite let in the information that in fact Asian-Americans are out-performing European-Americans in high schools and universities throughout America, and Asian-American family income is growing faster than that of whites. He appears to blame affirmative action for the high number of Asian and Jewish students in Ivy League schools, when in fact both groups have proven that admissions directors over the years have found shady ways to cap their enrollment despite their high achievement. He acknowledges a “white-Asian” elite in California, which he charges is being overtaxed by a lazy, underachieving black-Latino plurality supported by white liberals. But mostly he seems to see Asian-American achievement as just another affirmative action plot to take America away from white Christians. In Obama’s America, “the white working and middle class is being made to pay disproportionately for America’s past sins,” he writes. Eventually, “there is no doubt as to who will be running the country and who will be riding in the back of the bus.”
Seriously. It’s long past time for MSNBC to show some respect for their non-white viewers, fold up Pat Buchanan’s Green Room cot, and show him the door.