Against Pat Buchanan

Buchanan mocks Sotomayor:

[Sotomayor] went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children’s books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you’re, frankly if you’re in college and you’re working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don’t think that’s college work.

Yglesias responds:

Learning a foreign language, if you’ve ever tried, is really hard. Meanwhile, it’s clearly also important for people living in the United States of America to do their best to learn to speak and read standard American English. But this takes hard work. Sonia Sotomayor, like many Americans, was born into a Spanish-dominant family. But she worked hard, learned English, went to Princeton, then Yale Law School, then had a successful career as a lawyer, as a District Court judge, as an Appeals Court judge, and now as a [nominee for] Justice of the Supreme Court. This is, as I’ve said before, a good inspirational story that parents are going to tell their kids to encourage them to work hard in school.

Unless, that is, you’re Pat Buchanan in which case you take a cute story about Sotomayor spending her summers re-reading classic children’s books she hadn’t had a chance to read as a kid and turn it into a pretext to mock her:

[..] normally Buchanan claims that Hispanics need to work harder to learn English. But faced with an actual example of someone working to learn English, he has nothing but scorn and spite.

I think the most unfortunate thing about The American Conservative (which Buchanan co-founded) as well as paleoconservatism in general is its association with Mr. Buchanan's classless racism (including antisemitism).

Ordinarily bad apples won't hurt the whole too much—you can find plenty of prominent rotten lefties and movement conservatives with similarly disturbing views or lack of class. See Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michele Bachmann, Michele Malkin, et. al.—they get called for it regularly.

But paleocon-ish numbers are few, so Pat Buchanan's prominence creates a disproportionate image problem for the related ideas of figures like Andrew Sullivan, Daniel Larison, and Ron Paul.

So I cringe whenever I see Buchanan's name mentioned—paleoconservatism would be much better off if he'd shut the hell up.