Pat Buchanan loses his mind!
There are some people who, when angry about certain things, just they blow up saying some things that, we hope, they do not mean. In the past few days on MSNBC, Pat Buchanan has a whole load of accusations about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and Affirmative Action.
Pat Buchanan is a person that I feel is right on certain things at times when many people are wrong. For example, I think that he was right to say that the Georgians were at fault for starting the Russian Georgian conflict last year. That was when most of America seemed to think that the Georgians were merely victims.
However, we are not on his side this time. On HardBall with Chris Matthews he went about saying that Sonia Sotomayor was a militant Latina! Whoa! Is she a new national Security threat now? What kind of guns is she going to have? M-16? AK-47? Does Pat Buchanan even know what a militant is?
Next was a more legitimate point he made during the show Hard Ball with Chris Matthews and later on the Rachael Maddow Show. He went away blasting at the fact that she was a “Affirmative Action baby”. He felt that she was only in contention due to the fact that she is not White.
I feel that Affirmative Action has always been a wrong way to approach inequality and lack of diversity. Even if we have President Obama suggestion, to change it from a race based system to a needs based system (where poorer Americans would be favored over richer Americans), I think that it would not work as it is intended to.
I think that rather than giving fish away, I feel that minorities that are affected should be taught to fish instead. I think that the problems do not lie in the system being against Black and Hispanic people, but it lies in the grassroots. Money should be pumped into school and drug prevention. To be more equal, the environment that minorities live in should be as safe as they are for White and other forms of minorities like Asian Americans and Jewish Americans.
However, that would not be a right thing to say that a person who went to college via affirmative action is one that is of a lower ability than another that entered so. This is not only a slap to the face of institutions like Harvard and Yale as it questions their standards but also the standards of Blacks and Hispanics that studied there.
This is especially so in the case of Sonia Sotomayor. She has an amazing record and the very fact that Pat Buchanan refuses to take that into account just because she benefited from affirmative action. She is a person that has aced it all the way. When it comes to qualifications, I think that there is no doubt that Sonia Sotomayor is qualified.
Is she the most qualified person around to become a Supreme Court nominee, I really do not know. That is why we at ST have officially taken the position of neutrality when it comes down on this issue.
However what Pat Buchanan said is very wrong and to some, it might be offensive. I hope that he admits his mistake and never makes it again. It is not a kind of mistake that you can tolerate for very long.
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