Destroying the Right's Fraudulent, Racist Outrage About the Black Panther "Scandal"

Adam Serwer once again exposes the crude, ugly conservative attempt to flog the so-called "Black Panther Case" into a major issue. Excerpts:

Republican congressmen Lamar Smith and Darrell Issa are literally accusing the Obama administration of favoring "a political ally -- the New Black Panther Party." Think about that for a second: Republicans are casually suggesting, with a straight face, that the Obama administration is "allied" with members of an anti-white hate group. Never mind that one of the men charged in the 2008 incident, King Samir Shabazz, once described Obama as "the next slavemaster" and a "puppet on a string." The thinking seems to be that because the attorney general and the president are black, and black people -- or black Democrats -- all are filled with seething hatred for whites and an unquenchable thirst for vengeance over past wrongs, they must be in alliance. It's idiotic on its face.


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While conservatives constantly complain of being unfairly accused of racism, they've spent the better half of the past two years leveling such frivolous accusations against Obama, in the context of almost every policy decision he's ever made, from health-care reform to financial regulation. When you think about it, suggesting that the Justice Department is racist after having argued that Obama is actively ruining the economy to get back at white people for slavery actually kind of seems like small potatoes.


With the NBPP case, they've managed to turn one of the Obama administration's most low-key triumphs, the restoration of the Civil Rights Division to its original role as a protector of all Americans' civil rights, into an overblown scandal, short on evidence but long on the kind of race-baiting Republicans have freely indulged in since the first black president of the United States took office two years ago. Holder was right, the "the facts and the law," are on his side, and, as many reasons liberals have to be disappointed with this administration, Holder's stewardship of the Civil Rights Division isn't one of them.