You Can't Say That: Pat Buchanan Out At MSBNC

The oddly unpublicized suspension of Pat Buchanan from MSNBC - odd because there was no triumphalist chest thumping from the Pat H8'ers or quisling press releases from the suits - has turned in to an out and out termination, all because the contents of his new book were just too much to handle. As you would expect, Pat went out with dignity and with guns blazing:

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.   

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.    

 The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"     A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it "exists to strengthen Black America's political voice," claimed that my book espouses a "white supremacist ideology." Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, "The End of White America." 

... 

Consider what it is these people are saying.    

 They are saying that a respected publisher, St. Martin's, colluded with me to produce a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic book, and CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Fox Business News and the 150 radio shows on which I appeared failed to detect its evil and helped to promote a moral atrocity. 

If my book is racist and anti-Semitic, how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism? 

How did Michael Medved miss its anti-Semitism? 

In a 2009 cover story in the Atlantic, "The End of White America?" from which my chapter title was taken, professor Hua Hsu revels in the passing of America's white majority. At Portland State, President Clinton got a huge ovation when he told students that white Americans will be a minority in 2050. 

Is this writer alone forbidden to broach the subject? 

That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral has been doctrine in the Catholic Church for 2,000 years. 

Is it now hate speech to restate traditional Catholic beliefs? 

First off, I wasn't planning to read Suicide of a Superpower, but I am now!


Second, can we please take a moment to note that Color of Change is a group founded by the redoubtable self-avowed communist Van Jones? Nice to see what sort of people are now able to impact the public debate, such as it is, as it plays out in the mainstream media.


And, third, this is really a new low. Normally, media figures lose their jobs for making crass jokes at an unguarded moment. I can't recall the last time someone lost their political analyst job over a book, especially a book that, as Pat notes, was published by a major publishing house. 


Pat appears to have lost his job over commentary made about illegal aliens and homosexuals. His comments were, essentially, that the promotion of the interests of these groups at the expense of others - often in the face of popular opposition - will have a negative impact. I think a lot of folks silently agree with Pat on this, but we apparently are not allowed to discuss such things. 


One of Pat's overarching themes the last 20 years has been that we are making a mistake by allowing in millions of illegal immigrants who do not assimilate and do not participate in society. (that's the root of his "notorious" comment about comparing the problems of assimilating 1 million Zulus to that of 1 million Englishmen). Experience, especially here in California, is teaching us in real time that Pat has a point. This is nothing new. Pat's been talking about it a long time. But now, in 2012, we cannot discuss this any more. 


Another of Pat's overarching themes is that we are being morally weakened by a decadent approach to sexuality, an approach where among other things liberal elites are making every effort to promote a "right" for men to marry one another (and where the majesty of the office of the president is now being used to promote condom use).  Pat has argued, as has the Catholic Church (and Jews, and Muslims, and Buddhists, &c) that homosexual sex is unnatural and against God and not deserving of any sort of special legal privileges. Again, there is nothing new here. But, as of February 2012, we can no longer discuss these things. 


We can't talk about these things, but that doesn't mean folks don't talk about them. Here in California, there isn't any wide ranging anti-immigrant sentiment. But, it's not hard to hear people speak sotto voce about how they are reluctant to put their kids in the formerly high performing local high school because the student population has suddenly become 30/40/50% Mexican. And, it's certainly not hard to find people who voted for Prop. 8 while simultaneously voting for Barack Obama. The conversations are happening, even if we can't talk about it. 


What's even stranger is that there was little talk of Pat's suspension and termination. I'll bet most people didn't know there was a movement to remove Pat until they noticed he hadn't been on the air for a few weeks. MSNBC issued some terse statements, but these weren't heavily publicized. It wasn't until now, when Pat published his column, that there has been any sort of response to an alleged controversy so awful that a man must lose his position. 


There was no great popular clamor to have Pat removed from MSBNC. Instead, it all played out behind closed doors. If the ideas Pat attacked were so wonderful, they wouldn't need to be defended with the rhetorical equivalent of a knife in the back in a dark alley.