Here are some key actual quotes from Pat Buchanen, which illustrate why it is not appropriate to highlight him on this day that should celebrate American democracy:

ON AFRICAN-AMERICANS

After Sen. Carol Moseley Braun blocked a federal patent for a
Confederate flag insignia, Buchanan wrote that she was "putting on an act"
by associating the Confederacy with slavery: "The War Between the States
was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a
people to break free of a government to which they could no longer give
allegiance," Buchanan asserted. "How long is this endless groveling
before every cry of'racism' going to continue before the whole country
collectively throws up?" (syndicated column, 7/28/93)

On race relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s: "There were no
politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of
Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses,
playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." (Right from the Beginning,
Buchanan's 1988 autobiography, p. 131)

Buchanan, who opposed virtually every civil rights law and court
decision of the last 30 years, published FBI smears of Martin Luther King
Jr. as his own editorials in the St. Louis Globe Democrat in the mid-1960s.
"We were among Hoover's conduits to the American people," he boasted (Right
from the Beginning, p. 283).

White House advisor Buchanan urged President Nixon in an April 1969
memo not to visit "the Widow King" on the first anniversary of Martin
Luther King's assassination, warning that a visit would "outrage many, many
people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps
worse.... Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the
most divisive men in contemporary history." (New York Daily News, 10/1/90)

In a memo to President Nixon, Buchanan suggested that "integration of
blacks and whites -- but even more so, poor and well-to-do -- is less
likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction, as the
incapable are placed consciously by government side by side with the
capable." (Washington Post, 1/5/92)

In another memo from Buchanan to Nixon: "There is a legitimate
grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on
every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more
money.... If we can give 50 Phantoms [jet fighters] to the Jews, and a
multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks...why not help the
Catholics save their collapsing school system." (Boston Globe, 1/4/92)


Buchanan has repeatedly insisted that President Reagan did so much
for African-Americans that civil rights groups have no reason to exist:
"George Bush should have told the [NAACP convention] that black America
has grown up; that the NAACP should close up shop, that its members should
go home and reflect on JFK's admonition: 'Ask not what your country can do
for you, but rather ask what you can do for your country.'" (syndicated
column, 7/26/88)

In a column sympathetic to ex-Klansman David Duke, Buchanan chided
the Republican Party for overreacting to Duke and his Nazi "costume": "Take
a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not
in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against
white folks." (syndicated column, 2/25/89)

Trying to justify apartheid in South Africa, he denounced the notion
that "white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong. Where did we get
that idea? The Founding Fathers did not believe this." (syndicated column,
2/7/90) He referred admiringly to the apartheid regime as the "Boer
Republic": "Why are Americans collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy to ruin
her with sanctions?"
(syndicated column, 9/17/89)

ON IMMIGRANTS AND PEOPLE OF COLOR:

"There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue
that we are a European country." (Newsday, 11/15/92)

Buchanan on affirmative action: "How, then, can the feds justify
favoring sons of Hispanics over sons of white Americans who fought in World
War II or Vietnam?" (syndicated column, 1/23/95)

In a September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan
described multiculturalism as "an across-the-board assault on our
Anglo-American heritage."

"If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year,
or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to
assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?"
("This Week With David Brinkley," 1/8/91)

ON JEWS:

Buchanan referred to Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory."
(St. Louis Post Dispatch, 10/20/90)

During the Gulf crisis: "There are only two groups that are beating
the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense ministry and
its 'amen corner' in the United States." ("McLaughlin Group," 8/26/90)

In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler's anti-Semitic and
genocidal tendencies, he was "an individual of great courage...Hitler's
success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an
intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness
masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood
in his path." (The Guardian, 1/14/92)

Writing of "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the
historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel
exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide
to kill anybody." (New Republic, 10/22/90) Buchanan's columns have run in
the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter
and other publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist
concoction.

Buchanan called for closing the U.S. Justice Department's Office of
Special Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals, because it was
"running down 70-year-old camp guards." (New York Times, 4/21/87)

Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan -- despite protests
-- to visit Germany's Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS troops were buried.
At a White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly reminded Jewish leaders that
they were "Americans first" -- and repeatedly scrawled the phrase
"Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews" in his notebook. Buchanan was
credited with crafting Ronald Reagan's line that the SS troops buried at
Bitburg were "victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration
camps." (New York Times, 5/16/85; New Republic, 1/22/96)

After Cardinal O'Connor criticized anti-Semitism during the
controversy over construction of a convent near Auschwitz, Buchanan wrote:
"If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate
as indicative of our submission, it is mistaken. When Cardinal O'Connor of
New York seeks to soothe the always irate Elie Wiesel by reassuring him
'there are many Catholics who are anti-Semitic'...he speaks for himself. Be
not afraid, Your Eminence; just step aside, there are bishops and priests
ready to assume the role of defender of the faith." (New Republic,
10/22/90)

The Buchanan '96 campaign's World Wide Web site included an article
blaming the death of White House aide Vincent Foster on the Israeli
intelligence agency, Mossad -- and alleging that Foster and Hillary
Clinton were Mossad spies. (The campaign removed the article after its
existence was reported by a Jewish on-line news service; Jewish Telegraphic
Agency, 2/21/96.)

In his September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan
declared: "Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our
religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free." (ADL
Report, 1994)

ON GAYS:

In a 1972 memo to Richard Nixon, Buchanan referred to one of George
McGovern's leading financial contributors as a "screaming fairy." (Newsday,
2/8/89) Buchanan has repeatedly used the term "sodomites," and has
referred to gays as "the pederast proletariat." (Washington Post, 2/9/92)

"Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only
immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what
most say privately is they are fearful of being branded 'bigots' by
an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence
and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle."
(syndicated column, 9/3/89)

In a 1977 column urging a "thrashing" of gay groups, Buchanan wrote:
"Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is
accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a
collapse of its basic cinder block, the family." (New Republic, 3/30/92)

"Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in Judeo-
Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all
consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical
and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie." (Buchanan column
in Wall Street Journal, 1/21/93)

On AIDS, Buchanan wrote in 1983: "The poor homosexuals -- they have
declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution
(AIDS)." (Los Angeles Times, 11/28/86) Later that year, he demanded that
New York City Ed Koch and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo cancel the Gay Pride
Parade or else "be held personally responsible for the spread of the AIDS
plague." "With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear
literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide," Buchanan wrote in 1990
(syndicated column, 10/17/90). In the 1992 campaign, he declared: "AIDS is
nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature." (Seattle Times,
7/31/93)

Pat Buchanan is a bigot - pure and simple.