It's starting to look like it may actually have been a good thing that Pat Buchanan spouted off so nakedly about Sonia Sotmayor this week -- not so much that he did it, but that in doing so, he's finally provoked a serious response to the meaning of his ongoing presence in our national discourse.

People are finally starting to ask the question I asked back in 2006:

How much longer, one has to wonder, will our mainstream press continue to pretend that Pat Buchanan has not gone completely around the bend? That he is no longer the avuncular conservative from old episodes of Crossfire but a full-fledged extremist trying to resurrect the once-discredited ethos of white supremacism?

The evidence was more than abundantly clear back then, with the publication of his book State of Emergency, which was a vehicle for essentially a regurgitation of warmed-over eugenics theory from the 1920s. Buchanan was all over TV as well, spouting nonstop the fear that white people were losing their majority and with it their political power, swept away by a tide of brown people from Latin America.

Alexander Zaitchik's report for the SPLC hit the nail on the head:

To put it plainly, State of Emergency is a white nationalist tract. The thesis is that America must retain a white majority to survive as a nation. It is rooted in a blood-and-soil nationalism more blood than soil. The echoes of Nazi ideology are clear and chilling. As Buchanan helpfully explained to John King, who was interviewing him in one of his several CNN appearances: "We gotta get into race and ethnic questions."

Indeed, Buchanan has a not-inconsiderable role in the history of white nationalism in America in the past 20 years -- particularly the role he has had in mainstreaming supremacist beliefs, many of which are either fallacious or crudely racist. Leonard Zeskind devotes a sizable chunk of his marvelous history of the movement, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, to dealing with Buchanan and his sizable impact.

After all, he's been at this a long time. In a columm he wrote back in 1989 defending David Duke and chiding the GOP for overreacting to him, he counseled movement conservatives thus:

"Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks." (syndicated column, 2/25/89)

At the time, Duke had just finished running for president on the Populist Party ticket. His chief platform position in that campaign: stopping immigration before Latin Americans overwhelm the country. A couple of years later, Buchanan tried to claim that Duke was copying him, but it's clear from the chronology that it worked the other way around.

The good thing about the attention Buchanan has brought on himself is that it may finally shine a spotlight on the persistent and malignant influence of white nationalism on our national discourse and our body politic. Looking as we are at pan-racial, multicultural future, our success is going to hinge on our abilities to find ways to break down the old racial barriers that were erected by white supremacists -- whose worldview was dominant in the USA for decades -- a century ago and more. And as Pat Buchanan has been demonstrating, they will only go kicking and screaming.

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{H/t Dave]

Well, at least Charles Krauthammer didn't call Sonia Sotmayor a racist on Fox News Sunday. He just argued that she's basically a Latina supremacist:

KRAUTHAMMER: It’s a big deal because it tells you it was not a slip. It is who she is and who she thinks she is.

And the reason it’s disturbing is because Obama -- the premise of Obama’s candidacy was always that he was the post-racial American. And here he is appointing as his first truly important appointment a person who can only be called pre-racial.

He gave a speech in which he emerged on the world stage and said, “We’re not black America, white America, we’re not Hispanic America, Asian America. We are the United States of America.” And she says as a wise Latina, she has physiological, cultural endowments which make her superior to a white judge.

The real issue here is she’s going to end up on the court, but we can’t have a national debate about this issue. The civil rights movement abolished the idea of a superior race or class or ethnicity in America.

Are we going to have a person like her who believes that some ethnicities are endowed with a superior endowment and superior judgment and superior entitlements as a result of race?

Juan Williams attempted to knock this down by explaining what she was in fact trying to say with these remarks. But even he failed to explain a very simple, fundamental fact about the comment: She made it strictly within the context of a discussion on race- and sex-discrimination cases.

As we noted awhile back:

In that context, what Sotomayor was saying was neither controversial nor even particularly noteworthy -- it is in fact a matter of simple common sense. Of course someone who has lived through the realities of race and sex discrimination will be better attuned to the consequences and realities of the laws that judges will rule upon than someone who has been shielded from those realities.

Eric Boehlert examined the problem in even greater detail recently at Media Matters, and pointed out that there's been a massive failure across the board within the media to explain this simple fact:

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And of course, now the Republicans will accuse Obama of imposing a litmus test, since anything he does is evil:

The White House scrambled yesterday to assuage worries from liberal groups about Judge Sonia Sotomayor's scant record on abortion rights, delivering strong but vague assurances that the Supreme Court nominee agrees with President Obama's belief in constitutional protections for a woman's right to the procedure.

Facing concerns about the issue from supporters rather than detractors, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama did not ask Sotomayor specifically about abortion rights during their interview. But Gibbs indicated that the White House is nonetheless sure she agrees with the constitutional underpinnings of Roe v. Wade, which 36 years ago provided abortion rights nationwide.

"In their discussions, they talked about the theory of constitutional interpretation, generally, including her views on unenumerated rights in the Constitution and the theory of settled law," Gibbs said. "He left very comfortable with her interpretation of the Constitution being similar to that of his."

(Thanks, Jed)

Glenn Greenwald wrote about this yesterday and I finally got to post about it today.

Justice Sam Alito on empathy and judging

With regard to that last point -- how completely different is the reaction to Sam Alito and Sonia Sotomayor -- just consider this exchange that took place at the beginning of Alito's confirmation hearing (h/t sysprog):

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Judge Samuel Alito's Nomination to the Supreme Court

U.S. SENATOR TOM COBURN (R-OK): Can you comment just about Sam Alito, and what he cares about, and let us see a little bit of your heart and what's important to you in life?

ALITO: Senator, I tried to in my opening statement, I tried to provide a little picture of who I am as a human being and how my background and my experiences have shaped me and brought me to this point....

Anyone who is objecting now to Sotomayor's alleged "empathy" problem but who supported Sam Alito and never objected to this sort of thing ought to have their motives questioned (and the same is true for someone who claims that a person who overcame great odds to graduate at the top of their class at Princeton, graduate Yale Law School, and then spent time as a prosecutor, corporate lawyer, district court judge and appellate court judge must have been chosen due to "identity politics").

But the attacks thus far -- not just from the Right but from the sterling Respectable Intellectual Center -- say far, far more about the critics than they do about her. How can her "empathy" views possibly be distinguished from what Sam Alito -- at Tom Coburn's urging -- said when he was confirmed?...read on

Glenn has the entire transcript up from the Coburn questioning and should be read. The idea that our own personal experiences do not shape the way we view life is absurd and Alito used it to try and sell himself to Congress, but for Sonia Sotomayor, that's a disqualifying event.

Digby writes:

Yesterday I dashed off this glib little bon mot, which deserves a much more serious treatment:

One can't know for sure that the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts, who has so far voted every single time with the ruling elites, was affected by his personal experience as a privileged white male -- coddled, groomed and rewarded from his earliest days by the conservative establishment he served -- but it certainly isn't unfair to think he might have been.

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