"We Are Losing Our Country"

Sullivan pwns the panic-stricken rhetoric of Pat Buchanan's recent column, seen here on that bastion of racist, tin-foil-hat wearing wingnuttiness, World Net Daily. Here's Buchanan's main point: "traditional Americans" are white and Christian, and they are losing their country to illegal aliens and minorities, all led by a president of mixed race but with roots that predate Obama by many years.

Sullivan refutes Buchanan's claim that whiteness is what defines traditional America. Money quote:

From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity - the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient - or as ancient as America can be. The very names - Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?

He also links to a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates containing this brilliant observation:

Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today's legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing. If that's the country Buchanan wants to hold onto, well, he's right, he is losing it.

My italics. I love that last line.