I got your gratitude right here, Pat…

Pat Buchanan is always good for shits ‘n’ giggles, if your idea of shits ‘n’ giggles is blatant racism, ethocentrism, xenophobia and general kookoobananarama. It’s a mystery to me why this guy gets any media play at all, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the US mainstream media is just basically a Barnum & Bailey bigtop without the sawdust, greasepaint, and tutu-clad girls doing handstands on prancing Percherons. How else to explain the fact that a sucker there is born every minute, and a clown who says things like this gets no laughs?

In a March 21 syndicated column headlined “A Brief for Whitey,” conservative commentator and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan asserted, “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.” Buchanan was discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s March 18 speech addressing race and controversial comments by his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright. He continued, “Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.” Buchanan then asserted that “no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans.” Later in the column, Buchanan added: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

No gratitude? Well, how do you like that–Pat thinks those uppity niggruhs are ingrates. Hey Pat, since none of them will thank you, maybe a white Soviet Canuckistani can do it in their stead. So, I got your gratitude right here:

Thank you, slavers, for bringing Africans to the Americas in chains!

Thank you for inducing their own people to betray them and sell them to abusive strangers who didn’t even speak their language!

Thank you for letting so many of them die in the Middle Passage!

Thank you for working them to death!

Thank you for breeding them like cattle!

Thank you for selling them like livestock!

Thank you for claiming they weren’t even human, that is when you weren’t too busy claiming they were only 3/5 human! (And thanks for abusing science to validate the claim in modern times, too!)

Thank you for splitting up their families!

Thank you for denying them literacy, medical care, and enough food to live on!

Thank you for making a profit on their backs at every turn!

Thank you for forcing your alien religion down their throats!

Thank you for using said religion to justify what you were doing to them!

Thank you for keeping them, who once were free, in abject servitude until someone else forced you to do otherwise!

And thank you for subsequently forcing Jim Crow upon them!

Thank you for sending Hitler’s biggest inspiration, the KKK, out to lynch them–I’m sure they meant no harm! After all, stringing up those uppity ingrates is just good clean fun, right?

Thank you for segregating everything from buses to water fountains. After all, we can’t have no slave-germs fouling up our nice, lily-white environment.

Thank you for segregating the armed forces, too–after all, what good is freedom if you can’t get killed, separately and unequally, defending it?

Thank you for killing Dr. Martin Luther King, as well–that uppity ingrate had it coming.

Thank you for denying equal wages, promotions and educational opportunities to anyone who looks like they might not be quite white.

Thank you for all these freedoms and the prosperity they have wrought for the wealthy few, who are overwhelmingly white.

Thank you for wages even a dog couldn’t live on.

Thank you for the lack of any semblance of a social safety net. The impoverished people of color are all sobbing with gratitude for living in the best country in the world, and they owe it all to the magnanimity of the slavers who brought their ancestors to these shores in chains!

And, oh yeah: Thanks for keeping it going. Really.

Will that gratitude do ya, Pat?