Giving Pat Buchanan a platform

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Pat Buchanan can’t help himself when it comes to the Jews. And Menachem Rosensaft can’t help himself when it comes to Pat Buchanan.

Buchan’s latest: a recent column attacking President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?

But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.

Not in living memory has a Democratic president nominated an Irish, Italian or Polish Catholic, though these ethnic communities once gave the party its greatest victories in the cities and states of the North.

What happened to the party of the Daleys, Rizzos and Rostenkowskis?

My two cents:

  1. Is Pat also upset that two-thirds of the court in now Catholic, though Catholics make up less than half of the population?
  2. What happened to the party of the Daleys, Rizzos and Rostenkowskis? He should know, since he was a major architect and proponent of the so-called "Southern Strategy" that helped destory it.

But enough of my ramblings. Let’s move on to Rosensaft’s, published on The Huffington Post.

He, of course, has plenty to say about Buchanan:

Buchanan also objects that Ms. Kagan is not "academically distinguished." Really? Upon graduating summa cum laude from Princeton, she received one of that university’s highest awards; she then earned a Master of Philosophy at Oxford; and graduated, this time magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School where she was supervising editor of the Law Review. She went on to clerk for Judge Abner Mikva on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall before becoming first a tenured professor at the University of Chicago Law School and more recently Dean of Harvard Law School.

This particular charge is especially ludicrous coming from Buchanan who boasts that he supported G. Harrold Carswell, Richard Nixon’s unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee. Carswell was so wholly lackluster, in addition to being a segregationist, that the best Republican Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska could say in his defense that "there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers" who "are entitled to a little representation" on the Court.

But he also has complaints about those who continue to give Buchanan a platform:

The National Jewish Democratic Council has now launched a petition calling on Creators Syndicate, the distributor of Buchanan’s rants, to drop him as a columnist. While this is certainly a positive step in the right direction, it does not go anywhere near far enough.

To the best of my knowledge, none of Buchanan’s bosses or colleagues at MSNBC have ever publicly challenged him to explain his bigoted proclivities. The real question is why MSNBC continues to give him an aura of respectability by retaining him as a regular political commentator despite his abysmal anti-Semitic record.

The overwhelming majority of MSNBC’s viewers have no idea that Buchanan is not just another affable talking head. That is where he must be exposed. Buchanan has a Constitutional right to be an anti-Semite, but at the very least he should be identified as such every time he is allowed to appear on national television.

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