Pat Buchanan: Holder Deflecting from Obama's 'Wholesale Incompetence'

On Tuesday, Pat Buchanan accused Attorney General Eric Holder of shamelessly playing the “card of the victim” to draw attention away from President Barack Obama’s “wholesale incompetence.”

Last Sunday, Holder alleged that some Republicans oppose President Barack Obama due to “racial animus,” and Buchanan said that Holder is “mistaken” for thinking that Obama is “under attack for racial reasons.”

Appearing on the Laura Ingraham Show, Buchanan, who just published The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority, said it was “very, very weak” of Holder to lob such accusations.

“The attorney general is playing the card of the victim–that somehow people are after him because of his color–when the American criticisms that are coming down on Obama are coming down from people who even used to support him and voted for him,” Buchanan said. “And it’s because of wholesale incompetence. And this is the defense they’re throwing up, and it’s a very, very weak one.”

Holder also suggested those who say they want to take America back are also motivated by “racial animus,” but Buchanan said that when Americans speak about wanting to “take America back,” they are talking about wanting “the America that we grew up in–culturally, socially, morally, in a way that was a good conservative country–that it was really a good country.”

“And we think the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and a lot of what it produced, and the pornography, and all the rest of it…we don’t think it’s as good a country as it was,” Buchanan said.

On ABC’s This Week, Holder, who has also said that Americans should be “color brave,” instead of “color blind,” said he still believes, as he did in 2009, that America remains a nation of cowards, “too afraid to confront racial issues.” 

He then spoke about “a certain level of vehemence” that he felt was “directed at me [and] directed at the President.”

“You know, people talking about taking their country back,” Holder said, “there’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some, there’s a racial animus.”