Buchanan, Dobbs: Shoulder to Shoulder on Leprosy

Pat Buchanan uses his MSNBC camera time to blame the tuberculosis scare on the collapse of public health and faulty travel security. Ha! Kidding. He blames it on Mexicans.

BUCHANAN: Well, this is a serious problem because he's got what's called multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, Joe. Something like 60 percent of them die. It costs $200,000 to $1.2 million to treat folk with this. But let me tell you, it underscores a larger problem. TB is back in the United States primarily because of mass illegal immigration, folks who have got poor hygiene, poor health services in their country, walk across the border. Many of them don't know they got it. Out in Prince William County in Virginia, in my book, it's got a 188 percent increase in TB. Immigrant kids are 100 times as likely as an American kid to be carrying tuberculosis.

And the converstation zooms into the Dobbs zone.

SCARBOROUGH: Now, Pat, let me stop you right there, and let me ask you this question…

BUCHANAN: Sure.

SCARBOROUGH: … because Lou Dobbs has gotten in trouble talking about leprosy and all these other issues.

BUCHANAN: He's right about leprosy! I can give you the numbers!

SCARBOROUGH: If these—if these are the facts, though, how do we verify it, and how do we get out government to act on these type of issues without people calling you and Lou Dobbs and other Cassandras that are sounding the warning bigots, people who just hate Mexicans?

BUCHANAN: All right—all right, let me tell you the source of one of my things. Seven hundred thousand East Asians are believed to be in New York. "The "New York Times"—and it's in my book—said 100,000 of them carry hepatitis, hepatitis B. This is right there in "The New York Times." There are reports by all kinds of doctors and others on the increases not only in Hansen's disease, which is leprosy, where they found 7,000 cases in the first three years of this century, only 900 in the last 30 years before it.

These are documented, Joe. They're all in there, all manner—chigesis (ph) disease kills 50,000 in Latin America each year. Something like 19 million have it. It is now appearing in the United States. There are bed bugs back in 26 states. All these figures were documented in my book. Not a single one of them has been challenged by anyone!

SCARBOROUGH: All right, Pat Buchanan.

The most ironic part of this (give that "Buchanan wary of foreigners" is a dog-bites-man story)? Here's a pic of the TB carrier, Andrew Speaker.

You can practically smell the tortillas and hear the sounds of Los Lobos humming faintly in the distance…