Calling out Pat Buchanan

Dear Pat,

It has now been over two years since the shooting at Virginia Tech, in which you accused and maligned immigrants and illegal aliens (typically never bothering to differentiate between the two) as being fundamentally different from the European immigrants who came here before them. For two years, I have watched you railing against the evils of multiculturalism, and claiming that the elemental fact of ethnic nationalism will invariably lead to the Balkanization of America as individual ethnic groups decide to declare war on America to recreate their homelands (apparently these same immigrants are too oblivious to notice that they went to a lot of trouble to leave those same homelands and live freely here). Two years of distortion, fear-mongering and outright race-baiting as you have desperately tried to show that there is something inherently alien about non-white Americans. And very often, you have shamefully gone back to the same shameful argumentation you used after the murders in April 07-- the idea that America was some sort of Caucasian utopia before we opened our doors (after having closed them) and let the colored hordes invade, and that problems in our culture, particularly crime, can all be laid at the feet of these evil, foreign outsiders.

So my question to you, Pat, is this. Exactly which immigrants, legal or otherwise, were responsible for this madman ? He doesn't seem all that different from Cho Seung-Hui: both were longtime loners, burning with the anger stemming from years of rejection, both were deep narcissists with violent inner thoughts, and both ultimately blamed others for their life's problems and sought to achieve immortality through the slaughter of innocents. George Sodini and Cho Seung-Hui, and for that matter, James von Brunn, were not products of their race, or even, arguably, their cultures, but of their own psychotic selves. (How ironic, I thought Pat was supposed to be the straight-talking paleoconservative and I the bleeding-heart, moral relativism liberal?)

Look in a history book or read the news, Pat. White people are just as capable of being crazy and violent, Pat. Legal, naturalized, established American citizens, with no seeming "culture war" motivator, are also capable of slowly, or quickly, snapping, and killing their fellow Americans. And if anyone were to make the same inane connections you have between non-white spree killers and "cultural determinism"and apply it to white people, something tells me you'd be (rightly) frothing at the mouth. Think about that the next time you open yours.