Pat Buchanan Continues His Racist Attacks on Sotomayor

AlterNet
By Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet.
Posted July 17, 2009.

What opponents of affirmative action like Pat Buchanan fail to grasp is that this country was built on affirmative action -- for white males.

Yesterday, on MSNBC, Pat Buchanan attacked Sonia Sotomayor, specifically, and affirmative action, in general. Included in his attack were such claims as "this has been a country built basically by white folks," that Sotomayor was purely an affirmative-action candidate who lacks real credentials and his suggestion that we need more white, male Supreme Court nominees -- like Robert Bork -- despite the fact that 108 of the 110 Supreme Court justices in our nation's history have been white.
What opponents of affirmative action like Buchanan fail to grasp is that this country was built on affirmative action -- for white males -- and you don't have to go back to the Founding Fathers to see this in action.
If you go back to the 1950s, which Buchanan apparently wants to do, and look at the major private universities, you would find that 20 to 30 percent of the admissions were "legacies" -- people who got there not on merit but because they were the sons of alumni and donors. George W. Bush, of course, is the poster child for this generation of affirmative action babies.
I'd like to see Buchanan, or any conservative, defend Bush's admission to Yale on the basis of merit.

Full Opinion: http://www.alternet.org/rights/141408/pat_buchanan_continues_his_racist_attacks_on_sotomayor/