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Well, we got rid of this bigot on MSNBC, but he's still out there week after week on PBS with one of their other right wing relics, John McLaughlin, once again showing he's not quite ready for the 21st century with his hopes that we don't have a woman in the Oval Office for another few decades: Pat Buchanan Says, "Let's Hope" U.S. Doesn't Elect A Female President Until "2040 Or 2050," Then Claims He's Joking.

What's really sad relates somewhat to what Eleanor Clift pointed out, which is that politics is such a dirty game these days, you've got a lot of potentially good people who don't want to put up with the negative campaign ads and their name being dragged through the muck whether they're men or women. What did not get mentioned here is the issue of just how much money it takes to get elected and the impediment that is there to prevent anyone of any sex, gender, religion, party, or walk in life from having a chance to serve in elected office if you're not rich already or have the backing of those who are.

It is really pathetic that the United States is lagging behind a good portion of the rest of the world with the number of women in elected office or heaven forbid leading a country. It was sad to hear Buchanan hoping it remained that way for our highest office for decades to come, whether he claimed he's joking or not. I guess he's still bitter his girlfriend Palin didn't have a chance to get in there after she helped blow up John McCain's campaign.

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This weekend on PBS's The McLaughlin Group, we were treated to host John McLaughlin hoping for the return to the days of special prosecutor Ken Starr investigating another sex scandal. McLaughlin asked his panel what the probability that another special prosecutor would be assigned to investigate the recent sex scandal with members of the Secret Service hiring prostitutes and was met with a resounding "No!" by every one of his guests.

Pat Buchanan, who is still a weekly regular on this show on PBS despite his firing from MSNBC, told McLaughlin that there's no need for a special prosecutor unless the government is failing to do their job and investigate the matter themselves, which is not the case here. And Mort Zuckerman, who they had placed on the wrong side of the aisle as usual with Eleanor Clift, responded that "one Ken Starr was enough" in his lifetime.

That did not deter McLaughlin from proclaiming that there was an 80 percent chance that one would be assigned.

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Well, we managed to get Pat Buchanan off the air on MSNBC, but that didn't stop him from rearing his ugly head on PBS over the weekend to sing the praises of one Charles Murray, along with host John McLaughlin and The National Review's Rich Lowry.

John McLaughlin opened the second segment of the show bemoaning the decline of marriage in the United States along with the number of children who are born out of wedlock.

For a little refresher on just who Charles Murray is, I'll just refer back to David Brooks singing his praises earlier this month on Charlie Rose's show which I posted here -- David Brooks: The Villagers' Mr. 'Common Sense Center'.

As was linked and quoted in that post, Charles Pierce took apart Brooks' op-ed preceding that interview in his article here -- Our Mr. Brooks Finds Another Very Important Thinker. Rich Lowry in the clip above failed to mention the entire title of Murray's book just as Brooks did, which is as Pierce noted Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Somehow that whole "state of white America" portion of the title didn't seem to be very relevant to either of them. Imagine that?

As Media Matters documented before Buchanan finally got the boot from MSNBC, and as Buchanan mentioned in the clip above, Buchanan cited Murray's work in his recent book -- Pat Buchanan Won't Disavow Idea That Minorities Have Inferior Genes:

In his new book Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan cites The Atlantic article and the work of Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve with Herrnstein. The Bell Curve argues that there's racial differences in intelligence. Buchanan wrote in his book.

It seems trying to mainstream Murray's ideas are nothing new for our corporate media or for The McLaughlin Group in particular. From FAIR back in Feb. 1995 -- Racism Resurgent - How Media Let The Bell Curve's Pseudo-Science Define the Agenda on Race:

Continue reading »

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Another week, another day for Eleanor Clift to get ganged up on as the lonely representative of the “left” on PBS's The McLaughlin Group. This week one of the topics was Gov. Rick Perry's statement during the GOP debate that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Naturally, Mort Zuckerman, Pat Buchanan and Rich Lowry all came to his defense.

ZUCKERMAN: Yes, well you know there was a cartoon in The New Yorker and somebody was asking Bernie Madoff, “What was your inspiration?” He said “Social Security.” I'm not making that up. Okay, so that's in fact what you have in Social Security is we all know, you have millions of people who are going to be beneficiaries over the next several decades, and the funding still isn't there. And nobody's being willing to address this, either by postponing the age at which you get it. So in one sense it is clearly a false basis for the financial structure of it.

After McLaughlin chimes in and claims the money is not going to be there for young people as well and who also calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme, then we get treated to Pat Buchanan with yet more fearmongering.

BUCHANAN: But John, there is no trust fund. They say, look at the trust fund out in Virginia, they borrowed it and spent it. There's an IOU out there. He's telling the honest, though, hard truth! Is is smart politically? Romney is stomping all over him for having said it.

After some back and forth over whether Perry made a political mistake with what he said, we get this from the National Review contributor and Sarah Palin fan-boy, Rich Lowry.

LOWRY: The Ponzi language is not what's most dangerous to him. If he goes into a general election saying it's a failure and unconstitutional, then it will be hard to defend. But no one believes in the financing of Social Security over the long term. But it is a mistake for Romney to take this on now.

Late in the segment, Eleanor Clift finally got a chance to weigh in and talked about lifting the cap on taxable income to shore up the funding and the difficulties those who do manual labor would have with increasing the retirement age. Of course they all had a good laugh when she mentioned, heaven forbid, any of them possibly having to pay more in taxes. Heaven forbid any of these overpaid rich white men should think they might have to participate in some “shared sacrifice.”

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I've heard some really crass assessments on what game the Republicans should be playing with on whether they're going to raise the debt ceiling or not, but this one by Pat Buchanan on PBS's The McLaughlin Group has to take the cake. He apparently thinks that Republicans should continue to do their hostage taking on the debt ceiling to force cuts to our social safety nets for years to come as a means for political gain and that somehow voters might not eventually decide that's a bad thing.

I guess if you're some relic like Buchanan who is receiving his wingnut welfare and having anyone from MSNBC to PBS to right wing sites employ you where you don't have to worry about whether you'll be starving on the streets when you get old, this world view somehow makes sense. If you're someone who believes in taking care of the least among us and that we should be our brother's keepers instead of saying I've got mine and F-U, this sounds pretty crass and frankly pretty disgusting as far as political games go.

I'm also sure you won't hear one peep out of Buchanan or any other Republican if the debt ceiling needs to be raised once a Republican regains the White House, just as you never heard about this from them under Bush while he was breaking the bank with tax cuts for the rich and waging invasions of other countries that he kept off our books.

Someone needs to be asking not just MSNBC, but PBS as well why they feel the need to continue employing this racist, fearmongering liar at both networks.

MCLAUGHLIN: Question. Why has the debt ceiling caused a political impasse, Pat Buchanan?

BUCHANAN: A couple reasons. One is the Democrat's really don't want to give up on their entitlement programs and take the cuts in things like Medicare. Secondly and probably more important, Republicans aren't going to give them a dime in tax hikes John.

But I'll tell you who's going to win this. Boehner you see has more confidence. You see the president talking in panic. What Republicans are going to do, is they're going to wait until July 20th, and then they're going to take the Biden cuts, all the Biden cuts in social programs, they're going to tie them to the debt ceiling and pass them in the House and send them over to the Senate. So you've got your debt ceiling raise for one year, with the Biden cuts.

I think that Democrats, the President of the United States, will have to sign that. Republicans have an enormous weapon here and they've got the whip hand. By just sending over these debt ceiling increases with cuts on them again, and again, and again. That's how it's going to play out.

MCLAUGHLIN: Are you saying that the Senate's going to become part of the annual budget?

BUCHANAN: I think the debt ceiling battle could, it could be a six month thing. It could be a one year thing every year. Republicans have the whip in here John to force cuts in social spending, year after year after year if they play the game right.

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During this weekend's McLaughlin Group, Monica Crowley did her best to continue the fearmongering that we've heard out of her fellow Fox contributors about how the Muslim Brotherhood is going to take over the Egyptian government if they're allowed to have fair and free elections.

CROWLEY: Remember that President Bush began this public discussion about economic political liberalization in the Middle East. You had the Iraq War. But understand something, that yes the regimes in the Middle East from Jordan's King Abdullah to Saudi King Abdullah, all across North Africa and the Middle East they have to be very worried about the impact of this. But remember that the only Arab democracy that we currently have in the region is the one built by the United States in Iraq.

So when we talk about democracy the way we talk about it here in the west has a fundamentally different meaning than it has in the Middle East and because you have so many devout Muslims across this whole region, if they are given the vote, the chances are you're not going to get a Jeffersonian democracy. John you are going to get very strong Islamists influences. Just as we saw in 2006 with a vote in Gaza. Remember we're hearing the same kind of talk now with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

We hear now that the Brotherhood would only get 20-30% of the vote. That's the exact same percentage we were told Hamas would get in Gaza and guess what? They got 70% of the vote. Tread very carefully here.

You've got to love these conservatives. They only like democracy when it's at the point of a gun or when we get the results we want from another country's elections. Otherwise we're content to keep their dictators propped up and bought off. Robert Dreyfuss has a really good article at Mother Jones on the Muslim Brotherhood, sans the fearmongering -- What Is the Muslim Brotherhood, and Will It Take Over Egypt?

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When Monica Crowley puts up the same kind of list with supposed liberal violence or rhetoric that Digby linked in her post here with what we've seen from the right since they've lost their damned minds after President Obama got elected, then maybe I'll take her flame-throwing false equivalencies seriously.

Crowley decided to play the "all sides are equal" game on PBS's The McLaughlin Group and did one major job of projection here.

CROWLEY: I think it was a good, well modulated speech and I think the tone was perfectly appropriate. And I do think this was a presidential moment for him because, really for the first time in two years, he spoke on behalf of all of the American people, not just on behalf of his party, not just on behalf of the left, but really spoke on behalf of all of us. So I think it was an important moment.

I do think he missed two opportunities. The first one is, I think he waited too long to deliver the message. Another memorial service was scheduled for Wednesday, but he could have come out on Sunday or Monday with a message to his own side telling them to cut it out when they were drawing this very sort of malicious and vicious lies that somehow conservative talk or our political climate have caused this particular act of violence which even he admitted later did not. He let his side run wild for days with this malicious lie.

The second thing is, I think even though he did give an effective beat down to his own side by saying this does not… there is no direct correlation between this act of violence by a lone psychopath and our political climate. I think he stopped full of a full rebuke of the complete irresponsibility of folks on his own side that still continue to try to link this act or other things with political talk on the conservative side.

Eleanor mentioned Roger Ailes at Fox and Sarah Palin’s web site, but I would like to see the left take the lead in moderating their talk, because for every one example you can give from the right, there were plenty of examples on the left of the most vile, vicious and even violent kind of rhetoric coming out of the left.

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He just can't stop himself, can he? Sorry Pat, but no one's coming for Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh with hangman's nooses. This feigned victim-hood game for these narcissistic bullies is getting real old real quick. And leave it to the likes of Buchanan to bring something as offensive as lynchings into the conversation.

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Oh my. Pat Buchanan apparently isn’t too happy with the Republican Party for putting their “Pledge to America” out there and taking away from all of that “Tea Party” anger they were riding by heaven forbid, letting people know what their ideas are.

On this weekend’s edition of The McLaughlin Group, host John McLaughlin reads some of the pledge to his panel and asks “What is the reaction of rank and file Republicans to the pledge.”

Of course Republican hack Monica Crowley thinks it’s just wonderful, a “great start” and thinks it’s just fine that it’s rather vague because Republicans “want to win in November.” So I guess even Crowley thinks that giving too many specifics might not play too well for them.

Eleanor Clift points out that the pledge is “full of platitudes” and that it’s an effort to try to co-opt the “Tea Party”, a.k.a. the right wing of the Republican base and notes that the Republicans really don’t want to run on some of what these extreme right wing candidates of theirs are peddling.

Buchanan calls the pledge “disastrous” and explains why.

The Republican Party had tremendous momentum going forward so they interrupt it and they put this thing out. The very conservatives said this is a pile of mush. The Democrats said you’re going back to the Bush policies. They attacked it. And folks like me who were saying the party is really rolling along—why did you stop and interrupt this?

In addition John do you know they put it on the air at the same time Obama was giving a speech so that even on cable, nobody saw this event.

Eleanor Clift pointed out that after his carping about it that might be a good thing if Buchanan was hoping no one was going to pay attention to it. I must say I find it tremendously amusing to hear a Republican say out loud that they should not let the public know what any of their ideas are before a mid-term election.

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After John McLaughlin fawning over "dueling divas and media darlings" Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, he asks if the tea partiers are looking for a national leader. Eleanor Clift points out that most people don't think Palin is qualified to be president, calls the tea parties a Ron Paul movement and now foot soldiers for the Republican Party.

Monica Crowley pulls out the old 40% of the tea party is Democrats or Independents bull-pucky we've debunked before here at C&L. Then she plays the evil feminist women won't let Sarah Palin into their ranks because she's not a liberal nonsense. He reasoning; liberal women don't support Palin and Bachmann politically. Eleanor Clift points out how ridiculous that is. If anyone thought this show was bad before they let Crowley on there, she's really just taken it straight into the ClusterFox talking points sewer. Hey Monica... besides Eleanor's points, maybe most liberal women don't support them because they're both bats**t crazy. How about that for some food for thought?

Pat Buchanan tries to portray the tea partiers as "swing voters". McLaughlin asks Mort Zuckerman (who's on the liberal side of the panel where he doesn't belong btw) what he thinks of Bachmann's "gangster government" comment. Zuckerman says the "rhetoric is misplaced" and "unnecessarily arousing" isn't sure who they're appealing to. Besides being the understatement of the year there, I can tell you exactly who they're "arousing" Mort and one of them is sitting across the aisle from you. Eleanor Clift thankfully corrects Pat's nonsense about them being "swing voters". Monica Crowley of course defends Bachmann's over the top rhetoric.

McLaughlin wraps up the segment by asking if a Palin/Bachmann ticket is plausible or a conservative fantasy. Even Palin's fanboy Buchanan thinks it's a bit much. Eleanor Clift calls them the Thelma and Louise of the Republican Party, even Crowley admits that will never happen and Mort Zuckerman admits Palin is going to have a problem with her voice being "shrill". Yeah, like fingernails on a chalkboard Mort.

It was like watching an episode of the Twilight Zone hearing even the possibility of those two running together on a national ticket; Thelma and Louise indeed. Bill Moyers is leaving PBS and this relic is probably going to stay on there until he's 100... just ain't right...(sigh).