Pat Buchanan: ‘white people deserve more’

Pat Buchanan, the ultra-conservative American pundit has claimed that "white people built America and deserve more" on The Rachel Maddow Show.

Buchanan was on MSNBC's show to discuss the the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, whom he has consistently criticised as Obama's "affirmative action pick". Sotomayor, 54, the Princeton-educated court of appeal judge who is the United States' first Latina nominee, is only nominated for the Supreme Court because of her race, he insisted last night.

Asked by Rachel Maddow, the cable news channel's star liberal presenter, why it was that 108 out of America's 110 Supreme Court justices have been white, Buchanan sidestepped the question by launching a forceful defence of those "white folks" who, he argued, had been discriminated against. 

"White men were 100 per cent of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100 per cent of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100 per cent of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close to 100 per cent of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks... That's why."

Later in the interview, Maddow returned to Buchanan's "whites are victims" quote and asked him to explain. Buchanan, a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, responded by comparing the historically white make-up of the Supreme Court to an all-black track team or all-white hockey team. "If I look at the US Track Team and the Olympics and they're all black folks, I don't automatically think it's discrimination."

Earlier this week Sotomayor was forced to defend accusations of racial bias at her confirmation hearing. She said that remarks she had made in a 2001 speech, in which she suggested that a "wise Latina woman" could reach a better decision than a white male, had been an attempted play on words which "fell flat". ·