Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Pat Buchanan, racist
Have Pat Buchanan's frequent TV appearances on such "progressive-friendly" shows as Rachel Maddow made you forget he's actually a racist? TPM Muckraker, via FAIR blog, finds this in a recent Buchanan article about the Summit of the Americas:
America "does not comprehend how the president could sit in Trinidad and listen to the scrub stock of the hemisphere trash our country--and say nothing."Wondering what on earth "scrub stock" means?
There's no record of it appearing in the New York Times since 1943. (Hey, no one ever called Buchanan hip!) Until then, it was almost exclusively used to refer to an inferior breed of farm animal, usually cattle or horses, as when the paper reported in 1907: "Financial Disturbance Forces Cattlemen to Sell 'Scrub' Stock to Hold Prime Grades."...
In other words, "scrub stock" essentially means an inferior breed.
It's worse than that, though. There's evidence that theorists of racial and genetic superiority--an area of pseudo-scientific "scholarship" that was in vogue even among mainstream intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century--explicitly extended the use of the phrase beyond animals and into humans. In short, the phrase has been used by both eugenicists and racial segregationists to argue for the superiority of the white race.
