Pat Buchanan, Equal Opportunity Hatemonger

FAIR Report: PATRICK BUCHANAN -- IN HIS OWN WORDS

February 26, 1996 Contact: Steven Rendall

In the flap over Larry Pratt and other unsavory characters associated with the Patrick Buchanan campaign, journalists typically framed the question: Is Buchanan linked to extremists and bigots? But there is a more basic question journalists should ask: Is Patrick Buchanan himself an extremist and bigot?

Here is a sampling of Buchanan's views.

I just chose one paragraph (of many) per hated group from the original, well-documented article.

ON AFRICAN-AMERICANS

On race relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s: "There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." (Right from the Beginning,
Buchanan's 1988 autobiography, p. 131)

ON IMMIGRANTS AND PEOPLE OF COLOR

"If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?" ("This Week With David Brinkley," 1/8/91)

ON JEWS

Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan -- despite protests -- to visit Germany's Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS troops were buried. At a White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly reminded Jewish leaders that they were "Americans first" -- and repeatedly scrawled the phrase "Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews" in his notebook. Buchanan was credited with crafting Ronald Reagan's line that the SS troops buried at Bitburg were "victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." (New York Times, 5/16/85; New Republic, 1/22/96)

ON GAYS

On AIDS, Buchanan wrote in 1983: "The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS)." (Los Angeles Times, 11/28/86) Later that year, he demanded that New York City Ed Koch and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo cancel the Gay Pride Parade or else "be held personally responsible for the spread of the AIDS plague." "With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide," Buchanan wrote in 1990 (syndicated column, 10/17/90). In the 1992 campaign, he declared: AIDS is nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature." (Seattle Times, 7/31/93)

ON WOMEN

"The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the asher-dryer, the freezer." (Right from the Beginning, p. 149)

ON DEMOCRACY

In a January, 1991 column, Buchanan suggested that "quasi-dictatorial rule" might be the solution to the problems of big municipalities and the federal fiscal crisis: "If the people are corrupt, the more democracy, the worse the government." (Washington Times, 1/9/91) He has written disparagingly of the "one man, one vote Earl Warren system."

I just don't understand why such an evil, vituperative person has a prominent position on MSNBC. (MSNBC is owned by GE, my brain answers.)