Conservative Agenda, or White Supremacist Agenda?

Fox News, in its attempt to swiftboat Barack Obama because of his association with the Rev. Wright, has now openly become nothing more than a propaganda tool for the right-wing agenda. There is nothing "fair and accurate" in their reporting.

For example, it printed a "news story" that the Obama campaign received the "endorsement" of the New Black Panther Party because there was a group on the Barack Obama website, which was quickly taken down once the Obama campaign was made aware of it.

Anyone can start a group on the website, it's a social networking site much the same as Facebook. I could start a group today called "Mickey Mouse for Obama" if I wanted to.

What Fox didn't print was that the group had NO members and NO activity. That would have been the "fair and accurate" part of the reporting. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian, has successfully created a propaganda tool with the intent of influencing our national elections.

Here's the Fox News story.

However, I'm not surprised, seeing as how the most vehement host on the channel, Sean Hannity, has had a longstanding close relationship with well-known Neo Nazi, Hal Turner. From The Nation:

This year a man named Hal Turner sat before his computer at his suburban home in North Bergen, New Jersey, posting bomb-making tips on his website, hailing the firebombing of an apartment containing "Savage Negroes" and calling for the murder of immigrants. "When enough illegal aliens get killed they will stop coming to the country!" Turner wrote.

Turner was once a prominent activist in New Jersey's Republican Party. To area conservatives, he was best known by his moniker for call-ins to the Sean Hannity Show, "Hal from North Bergen." For years, Hannity offered his top-rated radio show as a regular forum for Turner's occasionally racist, always over-the-top rants. Hannity also chatted with him off-air, allegedly offering encouragement to Turner as he struggled to overcome a cocaine habit and homosexual leanings. Turner has boasted that Hannity once invited Turner and his son on to the set of Fox News's Hannity and Colmes. Today, Turner lurks on the fringes of the far right, spouting hate-laced tirades on his webcast radio show. Hannity, meanwhile, remains mum about his former alliance with the neo-Nazi, homing in instead on the supposed racism of black and Latino Democrats.

Read more here.

A conservative agenda is one thing, but a white supremacist bias is something quite entirely different.

Pat Buchanan of MSNBC has also held white supremacist and anti-Semitic views in the past. Has he ever distanced himself from these kinds of statements? Why is he reporting in the mainstream media on racial issues without coming clean about his bias?

Here is a sampling of Buchanan's views:

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)

I believe many African-Americans would be attracted to a lot of a so-called "conservative" agenda, but the Republican Party has got to purge itself of the white supremacists in its party for that to happen.