In Brief: Pat Buchanan Demonstrates Why You Shouldn't Give a Shit About His Firing:
Pat Buchanan, the pudgy, Catholic white supremacist who, until recently, was paid by MSNBC to represent everyone's old, racist uncle who visits at the holidays, shows us all in his most recent newspaper "column" (if by "column," you mean, "the unexpectedly slow death of an old order that should have been buried 50 years ago") why it's okay to not give a happy monkey fuck that he was fired.

In praising presidential candidate (and fellow Jesus-fellating Catholic) Rick Santorum's reliance on the bible and Christianity to attack the President, Buchanan jabbers, "What Santorum is saying is that in the struggle for the soul of America, though Obama may profess to be, and may be, a Christian, he is leading the anti-Christian forces of what Pope Benedict XVI has called 'radical secularism.'" Obama "may be" Christian? If one's public professions of faith and church attendance are all we have to go on, then is anyone ever not possibly secretly someone else? Holy shit, what levels of epistemological fallibility is Pat Buchanan operating on? How can someone believe, despite no evidence, that an invisible sky wizard created the earth out of nothing, but wonder if President Obama is definitely Christian? (And, of course, why should it matter?)

Oh, and who the fuck cares what the Pope thinks? Apparently, isolationist Buchanan believes America should follow the dictates of a foreign power.

Further, Buchanan bemoans the secularizin' of our decent, Christian country, pullin' out the history card: "An early triumph of secularism came with the Scopes trial in 1923 in Dayton, Tenn. Clarence Darrow, defending a teacher who had violated state law by introducing Darwin's theory of evolution into the classroom, mocked the Old Testament teachings of the Evangelical Christians, to the merriment of the establishment. From that day on, Darwinism was taught in our schools."

Let's see: Scopes was found guilty of violating a Tennessee state law banning the teaching of evolution, a conviction that was later overturned on a technicality, while the law was declared constitutional and stayed in effect until 1967. And "from that day on" is utter and complete bullshit.

So, no, at the end of the day, you shouldn't give a shit that this openly hateful and ignorant man (who, by all accounts, is a mensch in person) was fired. One less bit of poison in the air can only be good.

But, you know, the bad part is that Buchanan's hate stands unchallenged now. On the air, he could be shown to be the racist fuck he is. The Rude Pundit understands the decision and doesn't really care, but, in the abstract, the cure for hate speech is always more speech, not less.