As one of my cohorts here at C&L mentioned to me today, it seems rehabilitating Nazis gets you kicked off of MSNBC... and rehabilitating Nixon gets you back on. I guess the producers at Morning Joe decided their ratings weren't low enough already and they welcomed their favorite race baiting crazy uncle, Pat Buchanan back onto the air with loving arms, even though he was supposedly fired back in 2012.

Joe Scarborough invites Pat Buchanan back to MSNBC after 2012 firing over ‘racist’ book:

Conservative author Pat Buchanan was fired by MSNBC in 2012 over a book that many liberals considered to be racist, but he returned to the network on Monday at the invitation of host Joe Scarborough.

Scarborough’s affection for Buchanan was evident as Morning Joe opened the segment with “Welcome Back,” the theme song from the 1970s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter.

Over the course of the nearly 20-minute segment, Buchanan was given a platform to sell “The Greatest Comeback,” his latest book about President Richard Nixon. Scarborough even suggested that viewers would be seeing more of Buchanan “soon.”

In 2012, MSNBC had suspended Buchanan over his book “Suicide of a Superpower,” which contained a chapter titled “The End of White America.” Network President Phil Griffin said that the book should not be “part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.”

Four months after the suspension, MSNBC announced that Buchanan had been dropped.

As Dave noted in his post, poor old Joe and Mika were terribly sad when Buchanan was given the boot and as I wrote here, his buddy Chris Matthews was singing the blues when he left as well. I guess as long as you've got the right friends over at MSNBC, there's no behavior outrageous enough to get you permanently kicked out of the club.

Here's more from Wonkette: MSNBC Welcomes Back Hitler Fanboy Racist Piece Of Filth Pat Buchanan Because That’s All Behind Us Now:

But MSNBC has fallen off the wagon and gone on a major bender, because Pat is back to pimp his newest book, Why I’d Still Get On My Knees And Fellate My Hero Richard Nixon If I Could, and the “Morning Joe” team couldn’t be happier, because they had all the sads and thought it was very wrong when Buchanan was suspended in the first place. Pat was a “friend,” you see, and “a member of the family,” like that crazy racist uncle who sends you illiterate conspiracy theory emails and probably also touched you under the dinner table when you were a kid.

It would break the internet, as well as our souls, to even attempt to catalogue Pat Buchanan worst-kind-of-scum credentials, but in case your memory is a little rusty (lucky you), let’s review some highlights:

• Pat is a birther. The kind of birther who said he was maybe willing to accept that the president was probably born in Hawaii, but still, he needed to personally review Obama’s birth certificate to be certain, and why wouldn’t Obama just show his birth certificate already, it really was HIS fault that scumbags like Pat had questions about it in the first place.
• Pat believes America’s schools are failing because they are filled with black and Hispanic brains, which everyone knows are not as good as other kinds of brains, like the Anglo and Asian kinds.
• Pat has a real problem with The Jews. He warned that if Elena Kagan were confirmed to the Supreme Court, “Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats … Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?” Of course, because Elena Kagan is now Justice Kagan, and The Jews run the Supreme Court and basically the world, everything’s gone to hell, just like Pat predicted.
• Pat REALLY has a problem with The Jews. Years ago, he dabbled in Holocaust denial fantasies because he heard a rumor that testimony from Holocaust survivors was “unreliable,” since so-called Holocaust survivors are prone to “group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics,” and also, it was impossible for Jews to actually have been killed in Treblinka because science. Seriously. And just in case that doesn’t convince you, he has, on several occasions, praised Hitler. You know, THE Hitler. The one guy almost everyone on the planet agrees is someone you do not praise because Hitler really was the worst, worse than Hitler. Not to Pat, though, who has called Hitler an “individual of great courage.”
• Pat said this. He actually said this. He is one of those people:
  

  First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

I could go on. And on. And on. And on and on and on. The evidence that Pat Buchanan is a garbage person, so full of extra-spicy shit-flavored bile that you can smell his breath from here is slightly bigger than infinity. But you get the idea.

Alas, that’s all behind us now, at least according to MSNBC. Sure, Pat may have said a thing or two (or three trillion) that some might consider uncouth, but hey, he’s family, after all. And he’s got this book to peddle.

Think Progress posted this back in 2012 if you need any more reminders of whey they fired him in the first place: Why MSNBC Dumped Pat Buchanan: His 10 Most Outrageous Statements.

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