It is pretty startling how people can ignore certain facts to fabricate from nothing an argument to support their position, but that is what Pat Buchanan did on Rachel Maddow Thursday night.  He created this imaginary world with selective historical accounts to develop a grand theory of White Entitlement.  I have to type this with cellophane over my key board because I am just spitting mad about how, 140 years later, we continue to fight the Civil War and have such a long road to travel to make a more perfect union because of delusional, old, white men like Pat Buchanan.

For reference, you can watch the debate/shriekfest here. 

http://tpmtv.talkingpointsmemo.com/?id=2973685&ref=fpblg

If one agrees with Mr. Buchanan, then one believes that from the very outset the Founding Fathers intended freedom to be a blessing they would keep to themselves, white males, always and forever.  Mr. Buchanan declares that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were composed of 100% white men, implying there was a deliberate effort to keep other races and genders from ever rising out of their unrepresented status. Evidently, these other segments of society would be best represented by white men anyway, in his distorted estimation. 

Mr. Buchanan later emphatically stated that that those killed at Gettysburg and Vicksburg were 100% white males,  It's an interesting proposition, considering that nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought in the Civil War, nearly 10% of the military.  But we can ignore this statistic because these two battles were only a very small part of the four year conflict.  As critical as they were in leading to the final outcome of that war, there were hundreds of battles and within them there are several instances of the United States Colored Troops performing distinguished service, including a horrific engagement at New Market Heights, Virginia, wherein 14 black soldiers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.  If research is too much for Mr. Buchanan in his senior years, he might consider watching the movie Glory, a dramatic interpretation of an actual regiment of Colored Troops, the 54th Massachusetts, bravely storming Fort Wagner in a doomed assault.  With Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington among that actors, it's really very well done.  And did I mention the movie is based on fact?  I suppose I could also mention another little piece of trivia, that the South lost the War, but let's move on.  Blacks have fought bravely in more wars then that.

Buchanan also falsely announces that whites were "probably close to" 100% of those killed at Normandy.  Well, gee, here's a photo from the archives of the All-Black 320th Battalion on the beach at Normandy, June 6, 1944.  

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/05/2009-06-05_allblack_battalion_that_landed_in_normandy_france_on_dday_to_be_honored_on_anniv.html?CFID=17854669&CFTOKEN=44715724

These guys look black to me!  The caption states that many of these men perished.  If the battallion is All-Black, it is safe to assume some of the soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice at Normandy were killed while black.  Of course, there are all those Holocaust pictures too, and I'm not sure whether Buchanan is willing to admit to that tragedy either, I mean just because there are hundreds of evidentiary photos, but that's another topic.  {Author's note:  I do not know whether these brave men prefer to be referred to as Black, Negroes, African-Americans, Sable Soldiers, Buffalo Soldiers, or some name, but having served in battle, having assaulted the beaches of Normandy, I am willing to call them any name they wish.  They have earned at least that much.  In the meanwhile, I shall refer to them as black. though only for brevity sake.  I certainly mean no offense.}

With the war theme, I could continue to explore our involvement in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.  We could ennumerate the contributions of blacks in these conflicts as well, but I believe that history is so recent, even Mr. Buchanan would be hard pressed to deny blacks have fought in these wars with distinction.   I would simply refer him to General Colin Powell to explain these historical facts over a mint julep on the porch some cool summer evening.  

This post, so far, has been related to Mr. Buchanan's racist bent and focused on blacks, but the Hispanic population is given a similar disdainful and resentful treatment.  This critical moment in history, when a Latina will be elevated to the US Supreme Court, has apparently unleashed Pat's racist genie and his unrelenting fear of people not of his race.  But he fears her gender as well, which may be even more frightening to Mr. Buchanan as can be revealed in this quote regarding Sonia Sotomayor.  "She was appointed because she was a Latina, an Hispanic, and a woman."  Mr. Buchanan is so incensed with this insult to racial purity and so overcome with his sexist tirade, he repeats himself.  Latina already denotes hispanic. Those are not two separate "offenses", and Latina also denotes woman, for that matter, but if you listen to the video, Mr. Buchanan is blinded by his rage against the injustices to white males and fails to realize his redundancy.

In keeping with his fabricationist history, if you will, Buchanan attacks Ms. Sotomayor's education and achievements suggesting that it is probably that her grades were fixed in the spirit of affirmative action.  This is a mean-spirited assumption.  While Mr. Buchanan tries to avoid being labelled a racist because he would not assume the fastest men in this country were not selected for the track team because they were black, but the fastest runners, and that he would not assume that the all white hockey team from MInnesota was selected for being white rather then the best hockey players, he is willing to assume that Mr. Sotomayor was given good grades because she was a Latina, and not because she dedicated herself to studying and deserved them.  He questions her achievement of summa cum laude  when she graduated from Princeton.  Therefore, this is not simply an insult to Ms. Sotomayor, but to anyone graduating with that distincton from Princeton.

This post is about false entitlement.  It is clear Mr. Buchanan feels he is entitled to cast these aspersions around because he is a white male, history's latest victim of prejudice.  Why he is given a national stage to present these lies is beyond my comprehension, but as one commentor noted in my last post, at least now we get to illustrate how twisted and sick these ideas are.  So, in a spirit of unbridled generosity, thank you, Mr. Buchanan, for that.  And thank you, Oleeb, for reminding me of a position I had taken regarding the Reverend Rick Warren when he was invited to speak at the inauguration.  Pastor Warren made a great object of derision and enabled us to express his distorted view of society for days.

Freedom of speech?  Yes, Mr. Buchanan has the right to say what he wishes.  We do not put people in jail for that.  But we also have the right, no, the obligation, to declare that we will not move forward if we cannot face the truth of our shared history and the many contributions that have been made by people of color. 

Thank you, Rachel Maddow, for so emphatically defending a quest for real greatness for this nation in which we can utilize a much greater human population to locate the best and the brightest.  They are not all white and they are not all male, but they are all American, and our best and our brightest can come from anywhere as has been proven historically time and again, whether these fabricationist historian choose to acknowledge this or not.