Your Media: Patrick Buchanan, Analyst, MSNBC

In the run-up to this election, the media is not only paying scads of attention to the presidential race, but is also navel-gazing quite a bit. After the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries when so many newsies and pundits and pollsters we so horribly wrong about everything, many people wondered whether the media itself played a larger role in the tenor of elections than had been previously thought.

Since the Reverend Jeremiah Wright/Barack Obama debacle has turned a nation's attention to matters of race, I'd like to start this new series, focused on major media pundits and their role in bringing information to the electorate, and their own handling of race matters in America.

Patrick J. Buchanan, political analyst for MSNBC, is everywhere on the cable channel lately. If you're even a casual viewer of MSNBC you no doubt have come across the conservative, bombastic commentator. His depth of political knowledge is deep, personal and spans decades.

Mr. Buchanan has been a columnist, commentator (McLaughlin Group, Crossfire), speech writer and Special Assistant to the President (Nixon), White House Communications Director (Reagan) and presidential contender himself in 1992 and 1996 (Republican) and 2000 (Reform Party) and author of nine books. A "traditional" conservative, Buchanan holds pretty basic values of small government, low taxes and second amendment rights with his own robust disagreement with free trade, open immigration and neo-conservatism.
Pat's social conservatism is defined both by his party and his adherence to Traditionalist Catholicism. Anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, pro-school prayer, school choice and an adherence to intelligent design define his public writing and appearances.

By most standards, Buchanan is a reasoned, conservative counterpart to more liberal commentators. But his near-virulent abhorrence to multiculturalism and well-known disagreements with Dr. Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement and it's resultant legislation all too often bleed through otherwise "objective" analysis. His commentary on the Obama campaign has been riddled with his own prejudices including his insistence that the only reason that Obama is winning is due to blacks and Democrat "elites", completely ignoring results in such states as Iowa, Maine and Utah that have next to no black population. Pat was an early advocate of referring to Obama as the "Black Candidate" despite impassioned attempts by other panelists to convince him otherwise.

Just this week, in what I assume was moved along by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright debacle, Buchanan published this article on his website. I have a portion of it below.

A Brief for Whitey

By Patrick J. Buchanan

How would he pull it off? I wondered.

How would Barack explain to his press groupies why he sat silent in a pew for 20 years as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright delivered racist rants against white America for our maligning of Fidel and Gadhafi, and inventing AIDS to infect and kill black people?

How would he justify not walking out as Wright spewed his venom about "the U.S. of K.K.K. America," and howled, "God damn America!"

My hunch was right. Barack would turn the tables.

Yes, Barack agreed, Wright's statements were "controversial," and "divisive," and "racially charged," reflecting a "distorted view of America."

But we must understand the man in full and the black experience out of which the Rev. Wright came: 350 years of slavery and segregation.

Barack then listed black grievances and informed us what white America must do to close the racial divide and heal the country.

The "white community," said Barack, must start "acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds ... ."

And what deeds must we perform to heal ourselves and our country?

The "white community" must invest more money in black schools and communities, enforce civil rights laws, ensure fairness in the criminal justice system and provide this generation of blacks with "ladders of opportunity" that were "unavailable" to Barack's and the Rev. Wright's generations.

What is wrong with Barack's prognosis and Barack's cure?

Only this. It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, "everybody but the rioters themselves."

Was "white racism" really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities, as Otto Kerner said - that liberal icon until the feds put him away for bribery.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks - with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas - to advance black applicants over white applicants.

Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

(emphasis mine)

If at all possible, the rest of the article is actually worse. I don't believe I can add anything of value in my own opinion - the piece speaks for itself. And thus spoke your MSNBC analyst.