No one says that Buchanan is not bright and personable. He is, however, a bigot so far outside the American political mainstream that he should never have been given legitimacy by MSNBC in the first place.

If MSNBC's executives insist on retaining Buchanan as a fixture on their news channel, he must be clearly identified as an enabler of Holocaust deniers.

When Obama's agenda began to peter out under the weight of Republican obstructionism and his own tendency to play it safe, it was the Democratic base that worked the hardest trying to prevent him from falling.

I don't really care if MSNBC decides to keep Buchanan on its roster. What MSNBC should not be allowed to get away with is passing him off as a respectable analyst rather than identifying him as its bigot in residence.

To the best of my knowledge, none of Buchanan's bosses or colleagues at MSNBC have ever publicly challenged him to explain his bigoted proclivities. Why is this?

Buchanan's support for Holocaust denialism is ever-present, ongoing, and -- as his John Demjanjuk piece indicates -- very strongly stated. Yet NBC has done diddly-poo in response.

While the international community is busy excoriating Ahmadinejad for doubting whether 6 million Jews did in fact perish at the hands of the Third Reich, Buchanan's Web site is encouraging this very conversation.

For more than 30 years, my friendship with Tim was rooted in a shared Irish heritage and similar education, with minimal emphasis on self-expression and more on what Tom Brokaw calls "accountability."