illustration by jay bevenour

Pat's Pass

Why the Buchanan double standard?

by Liz Spikol

It’s funny what you notice watching political coverage. Last week, watching the Democratic National Convention, I was mesmerized by the peachy color of Hillary Clinton’s suit against a bold blue background. It was like looking at a creamsicle floating in a Caribbean sea.

Other observations were less pleasing, like Pat Buchanan’s prominent placement as Convention commentator for MSNBC. I thought it odd, given the timing.

What timing, you ask? Of course. Little attention was paid to Buchanan’s recent appearance on the racist radio show The Political Cesspool. It was noted by Media Matters for America, Jossip, and was the subject of a press release from the Anti-Defamation League. From larger media outlets? Silence.

That’s strange if you consider that Jerome Corsi, author of Obama Nation, merely scheduled an appearance on Cesspool and it sent them into overdrive—proving, they said, that Corsi is on the racist fringe.

In that context, The Los Angeles Times described Cesspool as “a ‘pro-white’ radio program that ‘opposes all efforts to mix the races of mankind.’”

The Nation wrote of Cesspool host James Edwards: “He has leveraged sponsorship from neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial groups to become America’s most popular white supremacist radio host.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch called the show “an overtly racist, anti-Semitic radio show hosted by [a] self-avowed white nationalist.” The SPLC said Corsi would be “joining a recent guest roster that has included Christian Identity pastor Pete Peters, Holocaust denier Mark Weber and former Klan boss David Duke.”

And Pat Buchanan!

What a double standard. Corsi canceled his appearance in the wake of bad publicity from Daily Kos, Huffington Post, CNN and other outlets. Buchanan, on the other hand, has appeared on the show twice, and the audio is posted to his website.

According to Cesspool hosts, Buchanan asked to be on the show. But no one in the Imus-inflamed media seems to care.

Tapper asked Buchanan’s media colleagues why. Howard Kurtz said it was because Buchanan was charming. Michael Kinsley said, “The bad way to look at it is that he’s getting a free pass ’cause he’s a pal.”

The more things change …

That free pass, still very much in evidence, needs to be rescinded.

This is man who defended apartheid South Africa.

Who stood up for David Duke and Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk.

Who once referred to Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied territory.”

Who characterized Hitler as “an individual of great courage.”

Who referred to Jewish “group fantasies of martyrdom” in regard to deaths at Treblinka, which he believes are exaggerated.

Who championed Joe McCarthy.

During the height of the AIDS crisis in the gay community, Buchanan wrote: “Our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide.”

He calls immigration “the greatest invasion in our nation’s history,” and writes the U.S. is committing suicide by not breeding enough white children: “Forty-five million young have been destroyed in the womb since Roe v. Wade, as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate.”

Buchanan even blamed the shooting at Virginia Tech on immigration. He wrote: “Cho was among the 864,000 Koreans here as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965 … Thirty-six million, almost all from countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country, now live in our midst. Cho was one of them.”

Though his response to Barack Obama’s DNC speech was glowing, he used Obama’s earlier speech about race to invoke misleading statistics of black-on-white rape, among other old racist tropes. On that occasion—not on TV—he wrote Obama’s “is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission.”

And last year, on The McLaughlin Group, Buchanan said, “If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is at.”

Picture anyone else in public life uttering those words. It makes Jesse Jackson’s Hymietown remark seem parochial.

It’s easy to ban hate speech or racist users from a website forum. Buchanan chooses to give Kapner a platform, a choice that would be met with outrage if made by racist poster boy Jerome Corsi.

I could continue to quote from other sources—especially Buchanan’s own website—to further explicate his bigotry. The information is easy to track down. Yet Buchanan appears regularly on MSNBC and The McLaughlin Group.

Come on, media colleagues. Do some Google searching, read his books, and take a stand. Otherwise, there’s only one conclusion viewers can come to: that MSNBC and PBS tacitly endorse Buchanan’s racist perspective.