Buchanan, Brandeis, bongos, & Jose

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Nov 21 10:46:39 PST 1999


The Brandeis crack was even more interesting than I remember it. As James Bennet put it in the March 3, 1996, New York Times:


>"How did Brandeis' football team do this year, guys?" he asked a
>group of young protesters near the podium at one point. It was not
>clear why Mr. Buchanan inferred that they were from that university.

Brandeis doesn't have a football team. So he wasn't only Jew-baiting, he was sissy-baiting too. And I don't think it's assuming too much to assume he knew what he was doing.

As for Buchanan's other codewords, Bennet reported this in the February 16, 1996, NYT:


>Mr. Buchanan has long seemed apprehensive about unfamiliar cultures.
>In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph of London during the 1992
>campaign, he complained of having walked through downtown Washington
>one day when "these guys were sitting on the corner playing bongo
>drums."
>
>"I mean, this is the town I grew up in," he said.
>
>On the campaign trail now, he calls for making English the nation's
>official language and imposing a five-year moratorium on all
>immigration. In describing illegal immigrants, he can be
>particularly harsh. "I'll build that security fence, and we'll close
>it!" he shouted at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, last month. "And we'll
>say, 'Listen, Jose, you're not coming in this time!' "

Doug



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