Watching Pat Buchanan's not-so-slow descent into Sotomayor madness has been a depressing spectacle to watch, and an embarrassing one for MSNBC to sponsor.

Witness his attack last night on The Rachel Maddow Show, in which he claimed he graduated from Georgetown University “as high as [Sotomayor] did” at Princeton, and added, “I'm not qualified for the United States Supreme Court. And neither is she.”

But in his 1990 book, Right from the Beginning, Buchanan wrote that after being arrested and expelled for assaulting police officers and subsequently allowed to return after his father, “by personal pleading, had the expulsion reduced,” “I was graduated cum laude” [original emphasis] from Georgetown in 1961.

Sotomayor graduated in 1976 summa cum laude from Princeton.