In a column for “Birther” website and conspiracy hub World Net Daily, Pat Buchanan — former MSNBC host and advisor to Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon — alleged that God has sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the invasion of the Crimean peninsula.

Right Wing Watch reported that, according to Buchanan, Putin has won the favor of the Supreme Being by leading “the counter-reformation against the new paganism” and fighting “the same-sex-marriage pandemic.”

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“In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity,” wrote the author of Suicide of a Superpower — a book that lamented “The End of White America,” and declared firmly that the U.S. was “built, basically, by white folks.”

The authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin, enthused Buchanan, is mounting a culture-wide purge against “pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide — the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values” and other conservative bugaboos.

“In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God’s side,” said Buchanan. “The West is Gomorrah.”

“[T]he war to be waged with the West is not with rockets,” he continued. “It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russia’s role, in Putin’s words, is to ‘prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.’”

After his political career ran its course by the 1990s, Buchanan established himself as a right-leaning pundit and author, finding a perch at MSNBC for several years.

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The Obama presidency, however, brought out the worst in the aging politico, as he showed when he said Obama’s Ivy League college and graduate studies were the result of “Affirmative Action all the way.” He published a column in 2009 praising Hitler’s foreign policy acumen and said in a TV appearance that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was nothing more than an “Affirmative Action pick” for the Court.

Finally in January of 2012, MSNBC dismissed Buchanan on the grounds that his far-right views were increasingly out-of-step with those of the majority of the TV audience.

“Because of the content of [Suicide of a Superpower],” said NBC president Phil Griffin, “I didn’t think it should be part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.”