Pat Buchanan Out at MSNBC

UPDATE: Pat Buchanan is out for good at MSNBC after the controversy surrounding his latest book ended the unlikely 10-year relationship between the conservative commentator and the liberal-leaning channel.

"After 10 years, we have decided to part ways with Pat Buchanan," the cable news network announced in a statement Thursday, the Associated Press reports. "We wish him well,"

Buchanan addressed the dismissal in a column at the conservative World Net Daily, in which he called efforts to permanently remove him from the network "un-American." He wrote:

"In the 10 years I have been at MSNBC, the network has taken heat for what I have written and faithfully honored our contract. Yet my four-months’ absence from MSNBC and now my departure represent an undeniable victory for the blacklisters."

Wednesday, Jan 11: Pat Buchanan has given two explanations for why he hasn't been on MSNBC since October.

The first is that health problems have prevented him from taking his conservative perch on the liberal-leaning cable news channel. The second? Well, we'll let him explain:

"Look, for a long period of time the hard left, the militant gay rights groups, militant -- they call themselves civil rights groups, but I'm not sure they're concerned about civil rights -- people of color, Van Jones, these folks and other have been out to get Pat Buchanan off TV," he told Sean Hannity on his radio show Tuesday. "This has been done for years and years and years and it's the usual suspects doing the same thing again."

MSNBC president Phil Griffin has stopped short of saying that the conservative pundit has been suspended from the network, but he nonetheless suggested that his recent absence was the result of the controversial views he detailed in his new book Suicide of a Superpower.

HuffPo has more on the spat. You can listen to a clip from the Hannity interview below:

Monday, Jan. 9: Pat Buchanan might not be coming back to MSNBC after finishing his tour for a book that laments the perceived loss of a more racially and religiously homogeneous America.

Many groups have taken issue with the premise of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, particularly the content of one chapter titled "The End of White America" (borrowed from an Atlantic article, which Buchanan cites), for racial and religious bigotry. 

Buchanan, who serves as a conservative political analyst for the 24-hour news network, has been off the air since October. Over the weekend, Deadline Hollywood asked MSNBC president Phil Griffin to shed light on Buchanan's employment status at the network. Griffin stopped short of making anything official but said that the ideas put forth in the book are not "appropriate for the national dialogue, much less MSNBC." Griffin continued: "Pat’s a good guy. He didn’t like [being removed from the air], but he understood."

Griffin made similar comments to other media outlets in recent days. "Pat and I are going to meet soon and a decision will be made," he told the New York Times, adding that while Buchanan is a "good guy" some of his ideas "are alarming."

Buchanan, who has a history of controversy (see his 1992 RNC "culture war" speech), posits in his book that America as a nation is "desintergrating" because of religious, racial, and national diversity. An excerpt posted on the Diane Rehm Show site elaborates further:

For what is a nation?

Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, by “bonds of affection ... mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone”?

If that is what a nation is, can we truly say America is still a nation? The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking. The birth rate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America.

It's unclear why MSNBC has decided to reconsider Buchanan's status now. He's been on air regularly on the network since 2002, and the ideas in his book are very similar to what he's been asserting for years.