Friday, July 17, 2009

Oppressed White Folks

Patrick Buchanan does not want the Senate to confirm Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. In a column published yesterday he made his position clear.

The chutzpah of this Beltway crowd does not cease to amaze.

They archly demand that conservatives accord a self-described “affirmative action baby” from Princeton a respect they never for a moment accorded a pro-life conservative mother of five from Idaho State, Sarah Palin.

Pundits here gets hoots of appreciation for doing to a white Christian woman what would constitute a hate crime if done to a “wise Latina woman.” But, as no Republican who followed the script of the mainstream media ever won a national election, why should the party pay them mind?

The imperative of the GOP is not to appease a city that went 93-7 for Obama, but to win back its lost voters.

In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate’s Hispanic vote.

If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.


What an incisive and profound revelation. The key to political victory is the white vote.

When Republican identification is down to 20 percent, but 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, do Republicans need a GPS to tell them which way to go?

Why did McCain fail to win the white conservative Democrats Hillary Clinton swept in the primaries? He never addressed or cared about their issues.


Hmmm, so more narrowly the key is the conservative white vote.

These are the folks whose jobs have been outsourced to China and Asia, who pay the price of affirmative action when their sons and daughters are pushed aside to make room for the Sonia Sotomayors.

I was not aware that only conservative white people suffered at the hands of both outsourcing and affirmative action. If we could only wrap this in the flag and appeal to the conservative white folks' sense of national pride. It didn't take long. Last night he was on Rachel Maddow and had this to say when Maddow asked him why 108 of 110 Supreme Court justices were white.

"White men were 100% of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100% of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close to 100% of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks, who were 90% of the nation in 1960 when I was growing up and the other 10% were African-Americans who had been discriminated against. That's why."

Will non-whites ever be able to repay the debt they owe to the whites who basically built this country? Apparently not. Thank you, Mr Buchanan, for educating us and showing us just how attractive the conservative movement is--to some people.

1 comment:

Lucas said...

I saw that on Maddow last night, and I still can't believe it. Repubs have gotten much more blatantly racist lately. As a heterosexual white guy in America, I can't say that I have ever felt like I was oppressed or that my rights were under attack. Crazy.