Brzezinski jumps at the chance to name Pat Buchanan “because he says what we are all thinking.”

Yeah, I don’t think that’s true.

In case anyone missed the point, Buchanan argues that the prize committee “reinforced the impression that Obama is someone who is forever being given prizes — Ivy League scholarships, law review editorships, prime-time speaking slots at national conventions — he did not earn.” The idea that Obama didn’t “earn” his 2004 DNC speech is, needless to say, sort of crazy.

Since then, Republicans have increasingly turned against Sotomayor, with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) the only one on the Judiciary Committee to support her nomination. In her report, Totenberg said Sotomayor will be lucky to get even ten Republican votes, and half of those are lawmakers who are retiring. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on Sunday that he’s still “going back and forth” on whether he’ll vote for the nominee, despite the large Latino population in his home state.

While some Republicans, like Graham, realize the Hispanic vote is growing and will be important to Republican influence in the future, many more are simply eager to appeal to their conservative white base in upcoming elections. And with influential conservative TV pundits like Pat Buchanan saying that white working class folks are the most discriminated-against group in America today, as he did on MSNBC, and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck saying President Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people,” the Republicans’ immediate fears seem to be getting the best of them.

Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women. As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.

Buchanan’s role as the last really unreconstructed racist in American public life has been a fascinating sideshow to the seemingly inevitable Sotomayor confirmation.

At about 10 am on July 8th, in the District of Columbia Superior Court, Judge Anderson dismissed the case against Marcus Epstein, who had pled guilty to a class 6 felony hate crime; the prosecutor declined to continue sentencing. It was determined that Epstein, head of Pat Buchanan’s American Cause and executive director of Tom Tancredo’s Team America, had completed his sentence.

Much more about the case here.

On Fox News, Bill Kristol said that “the more he thought about it,” Palin’s decision looked like a “shrewd gamble.” On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan compared Palin to Richard Nixon, who made a political comeback in 1966 by campaigning for Republican candidates.

I’m checking the reaction from pro-Palin sections of the blogosphere, and the general sense is one of bewilderment. From the thread at Conservatives for Palin:

WHAT THE EFF????? Why is she resigning??

we need to pray.

I can see not running for a 2nd term, but resigning? That’s insane. She’s not even a 1-term governor then. And SarahPAC just sent out the email for more donations on Monday.

if you want to, please pray now- for her family, for her, her staff. we need to be behind her.

I AM GONNA THROW UP. WHAT THE F***

I am sorry but we are not going to grant you a press pass due to the disparaging things you have said about our organization and our conference.

I think they’re talking about this.

–

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My recommendation is now and has been that the Administration — in placing minority members in visible jobs — stop concentrating on the “media’s minorities” (Blacks, Mexican Americans, Spanish-speaking) which are tough to crack, almost solid Democratic — and begin focusing on the large ethnic minorities (Irish, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, etc.), the big minorities where the President’s name is not a dirty word, where the President’s personal beliefs and political actions are more consistent with their own.

When we begin to recognize and act on the idea that there are as many Italian-Americans in the Bronx as there are Black Americans in Harlem, we will better begin to serve the President’s interests.

Later in the memo, Buchanan suggests a specific appointment that the president could use to prove that he cared about white ethnics: a seat on the Supreme Court.

[I]nstead of sending the orders out to all our other agencies — hire blacks and women — the order should go out — hire ethnic Catholics preferable women, for visible posts. One example: Italian Americans, unlike blacks, have never had a Supreme Court member — they are deeply concerned with their “criminal” image; they do not dislike the President. Give those fellows the “Jewish seat” or the “black seat” on the Court when it becomes available.

It’s striking how little Buchanan has changed in the intervening 38 years. In one of his anti-Sonia Sotomayor columns, he argued that the nominee had no more right to a seat than a “Polish- or Portogeuse-American” and that Hispanics would support her because “people often come out to vote for one of their own.”

(Hat tip: Rick Perlstein)

Winning Working America: How to regain the Hillary Democrats
– Peter Brimelow, Editor, VDARE.com
– Ward Connerly, President, American Civil Rights Institute
– Lou Barletta, Mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania

So, that’s the editor of an anti-immigration Website, a man who travels the country organizating anti-affirmative initiatives, and a Pennsylvania mayor who lost his 2002 and 2008 runs for Congress in the northeastern Pennsylvania counties that went for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the presidential primary. This seems to read much more into Clinton’s infamous comment that she was winning “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans” than she meant.

The stories about Marcus were for the most part inaccurate and incomplete.  Yet, the left wing bloggers ran with this little factoid because the assailant worked for organizations associated with Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo. What happened next was a modern day lynching by a faceless, angry, ignorant mob who reveled in the collective assault on their victim.

Speaking just for myself, as someone who knew Epstein socially, for three years, I think Buchanan gets at the point, then whiffs.

Yes, bloggers ran with this because Epstein worked with Pat Buchanan and former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) — two men who were making their way across the airwaves and the pages of popular news sites arguing that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was a “racist.” They did all of this knowing that they employed a troubled employee who not only had pled guilty to a racially charged assault, but who had a years-long record of white nationalist writing and associations.

I usually despise the “what if X has said this” framing of a controversy (which Bay Buchanan used to call Sotomayor a “bigot”), but consider — how would Buchanan and Tancredo react if, to pick an example totally at random, a Latina judge employed a top-level assistant who had written thousands of words for a Hispanic nationalist site, and who had pled guility to hitting a white woman and calling her a “cracker”? Would they stay mum or worry, publicly, about the possible “lynching” of this employee? Or would they, you know, call this judge a racist?