The week in "WTF???"

Two stories in the last week have me questioning my willingness to offer the benefit of the doubt to people who disagree with me politically.

First, there's Pat Buchanan's jaw-dropping rant on The Rachel Maddow Show, which sounds like it was ripped from a white supremacist brochure (and for which Maddow apologized on her show tonight). Buchanan, talking about Justice Sotomayor's confirmation hearing, claims that white people exclusively built this country, and therefore deserve some sort of special consideration (exactly what he would NOT offer historically disadvantaged ethnic minorities). In her rebuttal tonight, Maddow mentioned the tens of thousands of African Americans and, yes, Latinos, who, contrary to what Buchanan may have learned in his U.S. History class at KKK High, did in fact fight in the Civil War, as well as the millions of enslaved people who literally built America and many of its industries. (As I've written before, my alma mater's endowment was started with a donation from the family of one of my city's largest industrial slave-owners - money I'm thinking they probably wouldn't have had as much of if they'd actually paid several decades' worth of workers.)

Then there's the tepid right-wing response to the kidnapping of a U.S. private in Afghanistan. I can't even talk about this because it makes me sick on my stomach. Can you imagine how, say, Michelle Malkin would respond if a left-leaning commentator blew off the hostage-taking of a U.S. soldier just because it's not clear how exactly they got him? Personally I don't give a sh*t if Private Bergdahl said "screw this" and wondered off into the night for a clandestine beer. The man is a member of our military being used as a propaganda tool by the enemy, subject to heaven knows what. I'm so sick and tired of these right-wing moralistic MFers who presume to decide who is worthy of our concern and who isn't. Go perform an anatomically impossible act on yourself, Malkin.