Pat Buchanan and MSNBC
Pat Buchanan has been dismissed by MSNBC, the left-leaning news network, four months after the channel suspended him.
In an angry post on his blog, conservative commentator Buchanan took his critics to task, writing: “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.”
Buchanan says the calls for his firing began with the publication in October of his book “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” about America’s decline, which critics have called racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic.
Upon his suspension, Buchanan quotes MSNBC President Phil Griffin as telling the press regarding his new book: “I don’t think the ideas that (Buchanan) put forth are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC.”
Buchanan (a former White House aide to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and a former Republican presidential candidate) had been with MSNBC as a political analyst since 2002.
On his website, Buchanan called his ouster “an undeniable victory for the blacklisters.”
Among the groups he cites as his accusers – Color of Change, Media Matters, the Anti-Defamation League and the Human Rights Campaign.
In the closing of his post, he strikes a conspiratorial note, writing: “I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.”
Pat Buchanan.
For every liberal action there is an equal and opposite conservative reaction, and Sean Hannity gave his reaction tonight to MSNBC finally parting ways with controversial commentator Pat Buchanan after ten long years. Buchanan spoke to Hannity in an exclusive interview, and while the first part of it focused on both men attacking MSNBC, Hannity did grill Buchanan over his racially charged comments about the dangers of America no longer being a majority-white country.
Hannity took the opportunity right off the bat to go back into Buchanan’s past and his involvement in Crossfire – one of the first-ever cable debate shows. Buchanan admitted he was drawn to the format because he wanted to be in the business of presenting ideas and engaging in “real debate.” He accused liberal groups like Media Matters of being in the business of shutting down dissenting opinions instead of promoting healthy debate. As the saying goes: “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Both Buchanan and Hannity agreed that “elements in our society” like Media Matters are unfairly targeting conservatives in the media by pressuring network brass to drop someone who presents controversial viewpoints, as Buchanan does. The ex-MSNBCer was so disgusted with Media Matters, he encouraged Tucker Carlson to keep his fight against the group going. Hannity credited Buchanan with being intellectually consistent over the past decade, and wondered what changed. Buchanan couldn’t help but wonder what it was liberals are afraid of. Certainly not him, just one old man whose ambitions to serve in public office ended in the 90′s, but Buchanan suggested they’re afraid of “the people” who might listen to another point of view and change their minds.
But that’s where the joviality between the two ended. Hannity acknowledged that while Buchanan’s views haven’t changed, those views do include some eyebrow-raising statements about race. Buchanan defended the chapter in his book called “The End of White America” to a surprisingly confrontational Hannity.
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 October 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.”
Media Matters parroted the party line – He has blasphemed!
A Human Rights Campaign that bills itself as America’s leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people said that Buchanan’s “extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world.”
Their rage was triggered by a remark to NPR’s Diane Rehm — that I believe homosexual acts to be “unnatural and immoral.”
On November 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on.
“Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite” – said Foxman. Buchanan “bemoans the destruction of white Christian America” and says America’s shrinking Jewish population is due to the “collective decision of Jews themselves.”
Well, yes, I do bemoan what Newsweek’s 2009 cover called “The Decline and Fall of Christian America” and editor Jon Meacham described as “The End of Christian America.” After all, I am a Christian.
And what else explains the shrinkage of the U.S. Jewish population by 6% in the 1990s and its projected decline by another 50% by 2050, if not the “collective decision of Jews themselves”?
Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson: “so long as reason is left free to combat it.” What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American.
Consider what it is these people are saying.