Posted April 30, 2008 – As Tavis Smiley pointed out on the Bill Maher show recently, while the entire news world is focused on the incendiary language of Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor, nobody has so much as murmured a peep about the recent racist rant spewed by Pat Buchanan, a media darling and conservative commentator.
It’s not as if the 70-year-old former Nixon press secretary and former Republican presidential candidate hasn’t hurled hate speech before, but the lack of attention afforded his comments, given the current climate of racial tension sparked by recent appearances by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has made the silence deafening. Following are some of the remarks Buchanan made:
“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. Is White America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of White America?
Is it really White America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the Black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent? Is that the fault of White America or, first and foremost, a failure of the Black community itself?
As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence.
Is Barack Obama aware that while White criminals choose Black victims 3 percent of the time, Black criminals choose White victims 45 percent of the time? Is Barack aware that Black-on-White rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that Black-on-White robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?
We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of Black assaults on Whites that are real, we hear nothing.
Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago!”
Tavis Smiley calls Buchanan a “racial arsonist.”
So what do you think about Buchanan and his comments? Click “Discuss Now,” on the upper right, to post your comment.