Maddow says Buchanan "led" GOP's "Southern Strategy," asks if response to Sotomayor is "Southern Strategy Part 2"

Good for you, Rachel, for speaking the unpleasant truth and calling out Buchanan for exactly what he is. The Sotomayor nomination and the cresting of the birther movement were a perfect confluence which laid bare the racism of the new (Dixie) Republican Party. And I am delighted that, finally, people in the MSM are calling these people exactly what they are...racists and nuts.

(Channeling my inner Jon Stewart) Rachel has:

NAILED IT!

Rachel may be right and I pray she is.

The problem with the Southern Strategy today is that the demographics are changing faster than the Republicans.

Playing to white fear will only work in increasingly smaller and smaller parts of the south.

They keep this up and there may come a day when even Oklahoma goes blue (not in my lifetime, but I can dream).

The Rachel Maddow Show is just "refreshing, smart, and right on point" with knocking down the so-called logic from these Republicans in "NOT" voting for Judge Sotomayor as the next Supreme Court Justice. Boy oh boy, what has happened to the Republican Party that they must stoop so low to say they are re-building as an "OPEN" tent party for "ALL" Americans to join, and yet "PROUDLY" exclude ALL other non-white races for the good of re-building their Republican Party come 2010? This mumbo, jumbo rhetoric sounds like something former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin would say. Just saying, LOL Just sad to see indeed.

I don't agree on this...

This isn't Southern strategy Part II. ...this is just an wingnut on CNN who needs to adjust his medications.

In the new age of digital television, i believe the pollsters know exactly when a channel is chaged at the exact moment it is done. I have adopted an attitude that whenever patrick J Buchanan is on Tv, I change the channel immeiately and that is probably duly noted somewhere. This bad person seems to have found a home on Hardball so i switched to FOX, on purpose, during the event buchanan is on.

The Southern strategy Part 1 has not worked out so well for the Republicans and obviously, they did not learn their lesson. Part I they absorbed the Dixiecrats which means the Republican party is now home to people that are an anathema to the older more moderate Republicans who have left the party. These moderate Republicans have become Dems in the northeast and midwest. Any gains from the first Southern strategy have been lost. Southern strategy Part 2 is going to shrink the party even more because of the overt and covert racism. The only reliable voters for Republicans are Dixiecrats and some people in the western states, but even that is shifting. The Republicans have written off blacks as a voter bloc and now they are writing off Latinos. Both groups have a signficant amount of voters. What is left for the Republicans? At this time, it appears to be the right wing kooks.

Madow said that Buchanan is AS responsible as anyone for the Southern Strategy. I disagree with laying off so much of the blame on a guy who was never elected to anything. He was a hired hand. It reminds me of the way people these days are letting Bush2 off the hook effectively by blaming Rove as much or more as Bush2. I despise both Rove and Buchanan, but to inaccurately apportion blame is to learn the wrong lessons -- which will allow us to easier fall prey to similar problems in the future.

Unbelievable...Racism was open, then institutionalized, and now political. It has always been here, but which face was the loudest? Republicans,(party), may as well make there rallying cry, "White Power." I have no issue with any power speech. It is the actions that are counterproductive.

Unbelievable...Racism was open, then institutionalized, and now political. It has always been here, but which face was the loudest? Republicans,(party), may as well make there rallying cry, "White Power." I have no issue with any power speech. It is the actions that are counterproductive.

I think the critical moment for the Republican Party came in 2006, when "independent" talk-radio hosts such as Limbaugh and Savage derailed Bush's immigration reform package, with nativist concerns and ugly racial imagery.

This was a crushing defeat for pragmatists like Karl Rove, who rightly saw of engaging social conservatives in the black and Hispanic communities as the ticket to victory in a sharply-divided states like Florida and Ohio.

coded racism has long been part of the Republican playbook -- for me the most frightening instance, and one of the ones the MSM seemed most determined to ignore, what Ronald Reagan's opening of his campaign in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi (a hamlet famous for nothing except being the scene of the murder of civil rights workers), along with his statement of support for "states rights".

Unlike most of the Astroturf policies of the GOP, the parties turn towards naked racism reflects grass-roots convictions of a critical part of its base. Truly, the "Southern strategy" of the late 60s and 70s has produced a bitter harvest, one that will hopefully produce a legacy of defeatwhich they so richly deserve.

Good job. About time somebody in the media remembers Buchanan's dirty past.