RECENTLY, PAT BUCHANAN SPEWED an amazing amount of nonsense in an impressively short time on a segment of the Rachel Maddow Show.
He said, among other things that:
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Judge Sotomayor has never written anything that he's read in terms of a law review article or major book or something like that on the law.
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That she only got on the Yale law review by affirmative action.
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That white males were 100% of the people who wrote the Constitution.
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That white males were 100% of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence.
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That white males were 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
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That white males were close to 100% of the people died at Normandy.
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That this is a country that was built by white folks.
On a subsequent segment, Maddow limited herself to pointing out the actual errors of fact in these statements—specifically the falsehood of numbers 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7.
She numbered the law review articles Sotomayor has written, reported on a fact-check with the Yale law review, gave numbers of black Americans who fought during the civil war, and during other wars including Normandy. You can see that segment here.
But she left numbers 3 and 4—that white males were the ones who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—relatively untouched.
Which leaves something for me to add.
Those two points reveal more than all the other points about how Pat Buchanan thinks, and how racism is perpetuated.
In each of the other cases, Buchanan simply allowed his assumptions to control his beliefs. It's a kind of circular reasoning that is not uncommon among conservatives in general (even the non-racist kind).
He wants to believe that Judge Sotomayor is unqualified, so he assumes that the fact that he has never read her opinions means that she never wrote them. He then uses that "fact" to butress his belief.
He wants to believe that she couldn't have gotten on the Yale Law Review on her own merits, so he assumes that it must have been due to affirmative action. He then uses that "fact" to buttress his belief.
He wants to assume that only white males have risked their lives for this country, so he assumes that there were no minorities at the battles he mentioned, so that he can then use that "fact" to buttress his beliefs.
He wants to believe that white males built this county without the help of minorities, and so he conveniently forgets the Chinese labor that built the railroads, and the slave labor that built Washington D.C. and the entire economy of the South. And then uses those "facts"...
You get the picture.
But when he says that only white males wrote and signed the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence he's playing a different game altogether.
He's no longer lying to himself and others. He's doing something much more shameful.
He's holding up the fact that it was white men, and only white men (like Buchanan) who did these things as something laudable, something for us to be proud of.
But it isn't. It's something to ashamed of, or at the very least sad about.
Those tasks were not accomplished by white men because white men were more industrious, more courageous, or more clever than anyone else in the country.
They were accomplished by white men because those same white men would not allow the women, the blacks, or the native Americans in this land in the room.
What Buchanan wants to trumpet as a moral achievement of leadership is actually an act of prejudice and exclusion.
If a minority or a woman had tried to be part of that process they would have been thrown out—physically, if necessary.
Buchanan knows that. I don't believe for one moment that it is a fact he does not have.
And yet he chooses to use the very exclusion of minorities and women from the founding of our nation as a reason to never redress that exclusion—as a reason to call any attempts to address it "evil".
It's beyond wrong. It's petty, and nasty, and shameful.
He owes Rachel Maddow, and the rest of us, an apology for saying such a thing on her show.
At least, that's what I think today.
