If only I were a Puerto Rican woman, I'd have finished first in my class at Princeton too

If only....

Next life

Also, what a douchebag! Why is this guy allowed out in public?

And finally, I know from personal experience just because someone is considered "more qualified" somehow than someone else by some admittance committee somewhere doesn't mean they really are. It's all totally subjective.

I do know one thing that is beyond subjective opinion though. Pat Buchanan is a racist in every sense of the word.

Of course pat is a racist, no one with a brain could doubt that.
Why are people like him and rush and hannity etc., never called for what they are?

I suggest the answer is they speak to an audience of racists and fox TV for example makes a lot of money from ads that support their shows.

But lets not pretend these people are putting on some kind of a show and in real life are just great guys and girls.

They feed the right wing crazies because they speak their language .
And they speak their language because they believe in what they are saying.

I don't favor illegal speech laws like canada and germany etc., but lets at least be honest when describing who and what these people are.

Shorter Buchanan: "Only racists elevate those who are not white males."

As for the Lincoln quote, here's the context:

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy.

Buchanan seems to be suggesting that Lincoln, like him, was longing for a purer form of bigotry.

In fact, Lincoln is equating state-sanctioned bigotry with despotism. He was sarcastically longing for a purer form of despotism.

Total hackery.

Pat was never on the receiving end of the old-school in-your-face racial segregation and institutionalized bigotry of the South and he's too young for the older-school 19th century bigotry of "No Irish need apply", so it's not surprising he's dreaming of the halcyon days of the '50s when people knew their place.

Where's Captain Scarlet to tell us all that calling Pat Buchanan a conservative is unfairly pigeonholing him and wrongly putting political discourse into a misleading left/right dichotomy?

memo to pat..STFU

I just referred to him, probably three times in a week. The issue becomes: "When does Main Stream Media draw line."

When is enough, enough.

This fellow gets away with more blatant racism than any three guys on fox news.

SHE WAS NUMBER ONE IN HER CLASS.

What in the hell is there left to prove?

Pat B makes our country look so bad. And MSM just perpetuates the message by letting him appear on their shows. And most of the time it is on MSNBC.

THIS IS OVER THE TOP!!!

Since the first Gulf War, Pat Buchanan has written some of the best non-interventionist position papers in American journalism. But every time I think we're on the same wavelength, he drops an "I, Dumbass" manifesto like this.

Another reason to make higher education affordable,...so we don't have to deal with the real bigots like P. Buchanan failing to recognize that Sotomayr actually is qualified and worked hard to get that #1 ranking he thinks was just given to her. I guess diversity in the Ivy league has more to do with the amount of cash your family has in the bank and little to do with social culture.

So after a month of Republicans calling her and associating her with words like bigotry and racist.....they can't come up with a single example of her work as a judge and prosecutor to back up these so called activisms.

I guess the genius of the bigot calling another person a bigot is rich in hypocrisy,...one would prefer to just skip the false intellect and schemes and just call her what you think she is.

What B. is correct about is that lip service is not unadulterated truth. Sadly, he only pays lip service to this point.

B. is a professional pundit. This means he's paid to spin spin to make arcane or sensationalized arguments which have rhetorical appeal (pro or con) on current events. One can object to the underlying spin, his spin on that spin, the narrow applicability of his words, or fallacies in what he says. Of course one may always attempt outright ridicule as well.

"Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review -- all because she was a Hispanic woman."

It seems we must grant that S. was admitted to P. in part based on Affirmative Action. But doing very well *at* Princeton is a sign that she did have the goods to matriculate, that AA worked in her case. B. may be correct that the starting point of her college career involved AA, but he's got nothing to show that her grades *at* Princeton were not merited.

It's an American ideal that people can prove themselves by their abilities, despite their starting points. The burden on Buchanan is to prove that she advanced after matriculation only because she was given a significant crutch at *each* step.

"those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve"

worked a lifetime to ... get into college?? S. also worked as long, and against greater social and circumstantial odds.

cheated? The idea of AA is not to promote the lesser candidate but to not rely merely on common [prejudiced] measures in evaluating potential.

"One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest"

Be honest, Pat. Tell us what you really feel, without the nuance your words tell us you appear to hate. But don't confuse individual matters of taste or conditioning with objective honesty and Constitutional values.

I look forward to the Morning Joe crew going after Buchanan on Monday the way they went after Krugman today.

Buchanan is making assertations about Sotomayor's academic career as though they are already proven facts. What's his proof?

I'm guessing the year Sotomayor got into Princeton there were a lot of Hispanics who did not get in. She had to meet some kind of minimum standards just like everyone else. The point of affirmative action is not about less qualified versus more qualified; it's looking at two people of equal qualification and then giving an extra boost to someone from a disenfranchised group so that that group can have some representation at the institution.

So, who is Buchanan to say that the students who didn't get in were "more deserving." More deserving on what basis. Ohhh, poor little white kid had to settle for Dartmouth over Princeton, or God forbid, maybe that white kid had to go to Bowdoin. It's not like someone who didn't get into Princeton because Sonya Sotomayor did ended up some homeless person on the street begging for food; nope; probably ended up at Bear Stearns instead. So, rest assured Pat, your poor disenfranchased white child still may have had a hand in bringing down the world economy.

I don't think any discrimination is "benign," but Buchanan is really making the opposite case.

I'm sure before he said

"Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review -- all because she was a Hispanic woman."

He must have presented a mountain of evidence that Sotomayor was aided through Princeton by a vast left-wing conspiracy that pressured her professors to give her A's, and showed all of her flawed papers and essays.

Otherwise this would just be a bizarre racist diatribe that assumes she's "less qualified" just because she's hispanic!

Ivy League colleges, if left to their own devices, probably would not have even given Sotomayor a second look. She's absolutely an example of why AA works.

Let's not forget that the original 1948 Apartheid Laws in South Africa were based on the segregation laws of South Carolina at that time. They adapted those South Carolina laws so that whites would have most of the land and all of the gold mines.

That's the "old" bigotry that Buchanan loves so much that he won't even write that "I" prefer it.

Has anyone seen Buchanan on MSNBC since the Von Brunn shooting ?I quite frankly won't reward any show where the racists Buchanan is a part of.The only show I do watch consistently is Olberman's countdown.But moreover,giving these racists the privilege of getting access to the public airwaves is cause for concern.These incidents where lunatics get on TV & spew their BS will only inspire the lunatic racists.

"Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review -- all because she was a Hispanic woman."

She ranked #1 in Princeton class because she is an Hispanic woman? She was made editor of the Yale Law Review because she is an Hispanic woman? Really? These are statements that can be refuted by evidence. Isn't there anyone here who can do it?

The rest is horseshit. Lord, I wish people would stop calling each other names and deal with the issues. Our side is guilty of it, too, heaven knows. So there's an endless game of payback.

C'Mon!
"maybe Buchanan is guilty merely of inelegant writing." What a load of Democratic spinelessness.

This guy's entire career is built on having been a speech-writer (and apologist) for Nixon. He's spent his whole political life getting paid to write.

He meant exactly what he said, and assumes that the market he writes for will understand what he means: it was simpler and easier to just be a racist, rather than be one and try to hide it.

His audience, racists all, wants to hear that honesty in racism is the best policy

Someone posted the rest of the Lincoln quote above, thank you.

Arguably the most outrageous thing Buchanan is doing here is to make it appear that a man who was martyred for fighting against inequality would have supported the beliefs of a worthless scum like Pat Buchanan.

I guess she was Valedictorian in her high school because she is hispanic woman, and thereafter all the first ranking position, rather than affirmative action, I think hispanic women must be very intelligent. And now the privileged stupid white men cant hold onto positions maintained by sheer nepotism and discrimination.

I've known of Pat Buchanan for over 30 years but I never knew how dangerous he was until I started to see and hear him on TV so often.

Here's a question I think needs to be asked;

"Pat, old sock, what do you think your life would have been like if you were born black or hispanic
instead of white?"

"The old bigotry was honest."

Really? In what way? It denied anybody with brown, red, black, or yellow sking the chance to achieve what they wanted. Mexicans worked in the fields. Blacks ad Jim crow, the Indians were placed on reservations and the Japanese were imprisoned in camps.
"Negroes" were deemed lazy, watermelon eating, dumb, ignorant heathens. This was "honest?" Really, PB?

What kind of affirmative action got Meghan McCain into Columbia? She's a dope; her father must be seething that she brought his own history of grotesque sexist jokes back into the news with her article whining that the media is tolerant of attacks on Republican women.

I watched the old Crossfire back when it started in the early 80's and Pat Buchanan was partnered with Tom Braden. I remember Pat telling someone that Washington DC was better when he was growing up there and you used to see all the black women on line to take a bus to the suburbs for their jobs as maids. Whats going on with him is that he hasn't come to grips with the humanity of blacks and Hispanics, weird as that is. Affirmative action doesn't have the salience it used to for most of the rest of us because we don't care if a black firefighter gets the promotion over a white firefighter. We don't have a stake in it and its not our cause. Buchanan named his group "The American Cause" and thats the way he sees things.

Just a friggin dope, and a racist one at that. Having now sent four variously talented kids to fine colleges, and watched the process play out with their friends, it's obvious that AA may be a small factor in the occasional admission to a college, but so are a thousand other factors. Pat thinks (or claims to) that there's some magic scale by which all kids are universally measured, presumably, he would suppose, grades and test scores. Were that so, of course, Berkeley would be about 97% Asian-American instead of merely 38% or whatever it actually is. And the Bushes and (in fairness, Kennedys) would get into Harvard and Yale at an appropriately low rate. One of my friends is a not shockingly bright Harvard grad who cheerfully agrees that his admission was premised on their need for "a French-speaking tuba player from Madawaska [Maine]" which I suspect is spot-on. Hell, any school that did NOT consider Sotomayor's achievements in the context of her background would be guilty of Admissions Office malpractice. And, as many have noted, she proved the legitimacy of the process by proceeding to kick ass and take names at Princeton and Yale. It's simpply sickening that old racist hoots like Pat simply cannot imagine, in their wildest dreams, that a non-white woman is not only the intellectual equal of rich white men but, often enough, thei rsuperior.

You know, sometimes I'd like to write directly to Pat Buchanan, telling him what I think of him, but I've looked and looked for a web form or e-mail address and if there's a way, I can't find it.

Reminds me of Bush. You couldn't get in to one of his appearances without his people being absolutely sure you were a Bushie and there'd be no criticism or embarrassing questions.

Anyone ever find an e-mail address for Pat?

Your headline is pure crap. What Buchanan prefers is old bigotry to politically correct speech, and considering how completely public expression of thought has become so narrowly censored (including, apparently, in this article) by a seemingly unending list of special interest groups, I can't say that I'm not sympathetic to his views. As others have pointed out here, Buchanan has also articulated some very clear objections to the unbridled use of American military power around the world, and here I wish that Obama would wake up and follow his lead, and get busy unwinding our military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.