Pat Buchanan & MSNBC

Leave it to Randy to defend Pat Buchanan, someone I have little in common with politically. I have to say, I have NOT read his latest book, "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?" I have read some reviews of the book. Buchanan was with MSNBC/NBC as a political commentator for about a decade, offering various views, some considered to be rightwing (I concur), on all sorts of political and international events. For the last few years he was more associated with MSNBC's "Morning Joe," an early morning talk/discussion show on the cable channel, where he became a regular.

Just briefly, Buchanan worked for President Richard Nixon and later for President Ronald Reagan. He was on the original "Crossfire" show on CNN in the early 1980s (I watched it regularly), just before he went to work in the Reagan White House. He ran against fellow Republican and incumbent President, George Bush (Sr.) in 1992, and caused the President numerous headaches during the primary campaign, and later at the Republican Convention. He also ran in 1996, emphasizing the loss of American jobs due to poorly negotiated trade deals, a position which seemed to garner him some Democratic votes. He criticized both major political parties on this and other issues, often "social issues," like abortion, gay rights, and immigration policy, and he proudly proclaimed his staunch Catholicism and support of Church dogma. As I recall (and I may need to be corrected on this), polls showed much of Buchanan's support from white men, some even being dubbed "angry white men." When Republican President George W. Bush proposed immigration changes that would have permitted eventual citizenship for illegal immigrants who went through a process taking several years, Buchanan dubbed it "amnesty," and he and his supporters (and others) so battered the proposal, it went nowhere. Highly polarizing, Buchanan has been a red flag to Blacks, Latinos, Jews, gays, and many women, and that doesn't count the many white men who were also turned off by his heated rhetoric.

Last October Buchanan's book was released and MSNBC suspended Buchanan as some of the topics in the book sparked heated retorts from Jews and other minorities, including gays, as Buchanan charged that America is in decline because of minorities, and the decline in percentage of the population of white people of European heritage, as well as the decline of "European Christianity." Interestingly he laments that "Mexico is moving north," but Mexicans are overwhelmingly Catholic, the religion brought there by European Spaniards. Hm, I must have missed something. Anyway, a little over a month ago, MSNBC terminated its relationship with the outspoken Buchanan. "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough (a former Republcian congressman) and Mika Brzezinski (daughter of foreign policy analyst and author Zbigniew Brzezinski) both offered personal support for Buchanan, while noting the differences they had with many of his opinions, especially those opinions offered up in this book. They countered that a debate of Buchanan's ideas is the best way to expose his fallacies (this is not a quote, but my take on their remarks). I totally agree. I'm not too keen on firing commentators, columnists, etc over their views. I'm not afraid of views contrary to my own, rather I like the debate over such things. Now, some might well argue that Buchanan's views fire up some of like mind, including racists and bigots, but they will always find things to be fired up about, and making him something of a martyr does the same thing, but without input from those with other viewpoints. That is far more dangerous, in my opinion.

WORD HISTORY:
Woman-This word is really a compound, which was then contracted into the modern form. It is an English creation and is thus peculiar to English among the Germanic languages. In Old English (Anglo-Saxon), the common word for a female human was "wif," which is obviously still with us in the modern form "wife" (this will be the next "Word History"). English put together "wif" and "mann" ("man" in the sense of "human being") as "wifmann" for a "female human." Pronunciation variations as the "f" sound died out later made this "wimman" (also spelled "wiman") and "wumman," before the modern version. The process whereby "woman" replaced "wife" for a "female human being" took a few centuries, but since "wife" came to by applied more and more to "a married female, a female spouse," "woman" finally triumphed, as many men already know.