Crackpots calling the kettle black
Race-baiting lowlights from Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, two of the pundits who say Sonia Sotomayor is racist.
By Joe Conason
June 5, 2009 | Whores and politicians become respectable if they stick around long enough, as someone once observed, and the same is plainly true of media personalities – especially in a culture that never pauses long enough to remember anything. Where amnesia is the rule, there can be no accountability for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Patrick Buchanan and the rest of the broadcast mob denouncing the "racism" of Sonia Sotomayor. If anyone remembers who they are and what they have said over the years, their complaints about the Latina Supreme Court nominee will only elicit raucous laughter.
Who are these guys – with their long and sordid histories of encouraging white paranoia and ethnic division – to call her a racist?
In Washington media circles, Pat Buchanan is a well-liked and avuncular figure, presumably owing to his personal qualities rather than his crank politics, but
for him to be encouraged to pontificate endlessly on the subject of race on television is worse than ludicrous. The late William F. Buckley Jr. expelled Buchanan from the pages of the National Review many years ago for his crudely anti-Semitic rants, which included a very unattractive tinge of admiration for Hitler. (Prejudice against Jews, unlike some other forms of bigotry, is anathema to most conservatives.) So obnoxious was Pat's blustering bully-boy attitude that he became intolerable even to the intolerant.As for racism, where to begin with him? Discussing Sotomayor on MSNBC, Buchanan accused her of adopting the same attitudes that had kept blacks down in old Dixie. "Her entire career is based on advancing people of color, which is done at the expense of white people," he cried in that familiar high-pitched whine. "That was what was done in the South. They're doing it now to white males now…"
Except that Pat didn't mind so much when "they" were doing it to black folks in the South. He explicitly supported the race-based "Southern strategy" of his old boss Richard Nixon, whom he advised to avoid meeting with Coretta King one year after the murder of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr. In April 1969, he warned Nixon in a White House memo that visiting Mrs. King 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."
more...
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/06/05/sotomayor/
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