Justice for All: DOJ and the New Black Panthers

Wretchard:

The salient thing about J. Christian Adams’s accusation that the Obama administration deliberately let off the New Black Panther Party after it engaged in voter intimidation is that, if true, it constitutes a pure exercise in the abuse of power. The other wrongs it represents — the perversion of the electoral process, the violation of civil rights — are secondary. The most serious allegation in the whole affair is that the certain officials countenanced a crime because they wanted to. The most concentrated expression of tyranny is malice in the service of caprice. . . .


The greatest damage that political correctness has inflicted on society is to make each of us forget that underneath the accidents of color, nationality and creed, that all of us are men. By dividing humanity into hyphenated buckets, each sequestered in its hate, the puppet masters have managed to set one against the other so thoroughly that the sharpers, wheeler-dealers and fixers can operate undisturbed. In a world where every one thinks of himself as white, black, gay, straight — we have forgotten that the real distinction is between who holds power and who does not. Nothing else matters. The Black Panthers and the three men who are suspected of killing Robert Wone are not impotent underdogs. On the contrary, they wield far more power than we, in our normal lives, could ever dispose of. God grant we never meet them, for if we do, we meet them alone. . . . .

Update II - Ace's comment seems to fit with Wretchard's statement:  "Here's the sort of guy Eric Holder perilously sprang free. "   And Ace is talking about perils to civil rights law - not just to perils against innocent people. Read the whole post and watch the video:

You want freedom?  You're going to have to kill some crackers.  You're going to have to kill some of their babies. 

This is the same guy speaking out in the voter intimidation video presented to the DOJ, just to be clear.

"Social Justice" sometimes means the eradication of "equality before the law".  Our Department of Justice does not appear to believe in equality before the law.  Transforming America, indeed. As Wretchard suggests, if the DOJ acted as it appears to have acted, God help us.

The whistleblower in the dismissal of the New Black Panther case is now being slimed by the DOJ. Typical. Whistleblowers often suffer massive hardship for the rest of us, with little or no thanks.

Might there be a connection between the relative lack of media coverage of the New Black Panther case dismissal and the outing of David Weigel's Journolist posts in order to get him fired? He seems to be the only person at the two major Eastern dailies who mentioned the case.

UPDATE:  The whistleblower explains why he was upset enough to resign.  Also check out the powerful video, an interview of a civil rights attorney who witnessed the intimidation by members of the New Black Panther Party.  He's a self-identified "old liberal", sort of like Dennis Prager - worked on the election campaigns of Robert Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and the first black man to run for governor in Mississippi. "New liberals" are different. They tend to think of "group rights" and "social justice" (which means different things to different people) before "individual rights" and "justice under the law".

Some Blacks are not "black enough" to be advanced by the NAACP

Do you think that Rush Limbaugh's "NAALCP" designation for the NAACP is a "smear"?

 NAACP leaders caught on tape saying that one black man who was assaulted at a political event is not black enough to deserve protection by the NAACP:

Here it is, the day after a young brother, a young man, I didn’t mean to call him a brother, but on the front page of the Post Dispatch, ironically, he’s sitting in a wheelchair, being kissed on the forehead, by a European. Now just imagine that as a poster child picture, not working for our people.

Darleen at Protein Wisdom:

The Personal is Political mantra of the Left is no more glaring than in the realm of sex and race — what makes an “authentic” woman or “authentic” black person is determined strictly by their politics. The tactic allows the Left to keep its pet “minorities” in line with the threat of challenging their identity if they stray and it allows the Left to entirely avoid any substantive debate with non-left “minorities” because such “Uncle Toms”, et al, are just traitors to their sex/race.

The poison runs deep: J. Christian Adams, the DOJ lawyer who resigned over Black Panther voter intimidation scandal has written about the hostility of Obama’s DOJ towards “non-minority” victims. . . .

As Wretchard noted soon after this story broke,

The Black Panthers and the three men who are suspected of killing Robert Wone are not impotent underdogs. On the contrary, they wield far more power than we, in our normal lives, could ever dispose of. God grant we never meet them, for if we do, we meet them alone. . . . .

The conflict between the idea of laws built upon individual rights vs. the idea of laws built upon group rights and group equity is one of the primary ideological conflicts in our country at this time.

NAACP Lobbies in Favor of Voter Intimidation? DOJ also?

"Some people are more equal than others".

The National Association for the Advancement of Liberal Colored People, according to management within the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice,  lobbied the government to dismiss the DOJ case against the New Black Panthers AT THE SENTENCING PHASE OF THE TRIAL. The whistleblowing attorney from the DOJ resigned in part because DOJ attorneys were prohibited by the administration from testifying before the Civil Rights Commission in this case. His supervisor's responsibilities within DOJ were sharply curtailed after he opposed dismissal of the case (he was relieved of his post).

Again, to the NAACP, "Social Justice" seems to mean special privileges for certain interest groups. The dismissal of this case treats certain victims as less important as others. "The Obama Administration is turning a blind eye to racial equality". The Department of Justice no longer supports "justice" in the traditional sense.  Transforming America.

The traditional major media did not show up at the Civil Rights Commission hearing. Fox News and the DC Examiner went.

Our country has some very deep problems.

Update: Abigail Themstrom calls for less inflammatory rhetoric by conservatives and defends (or at least tries to explain) the handling of the case. She has a few good points.  Inflammatory rhetoric is expected from liberals, but it undermines the positions of conservatives.  On the other hand,  boots do look like "jackboots" when military-style garb is tucked into the tops of them. Nightsticks are, indeed, weapons, which is why police carry them. And one of the defendants in the case is far more inflammatory in his rhetoric than any mainstream conservative has been concerning this case.

  But she  points out some far larger issues about which conservatives should be concerned if they wish to promote a race-neutral society.   She sees this case as small potatoes compared to the race-based policy changes concerning voting now under consideration. But not everyone takes this case lightly.

Jim Treacher:

Stopping a black guy from intimidating voters is racist, you racist. . . .

On a related note, a pet peeve: Could we please stop calling it “reverse racism”? Racism is racism. The only reverse racism is not being racist.

Update: President of New Black Panther Party admits voter intimidation (his little brother is the one who called for murdering white people and their babies in front of a National Geographic camera).

Update: Remember the idea behind Careful Reading Tuesday.

Zero Tolerance for Speaking Truth to Power

Rep. John Conyers asked comedian Stephen Colbert to leave the committee room rather than present live "testimony" concerning immigration. Donald Sensing compares the media reactions to testimony by Stephen Colbert and Christopher Coates on the same day:

Colbert 1,300; Coates 196


That's the count on Google News' leads of the coverage of the testimonies of comedian Stephen Colbert and Dept. of Justice official Christopher Coates. Colbert testified before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. Coates appeared before the US Civil Rights Commission. . . .


Note that the major media covered Colbert exhaustively, but were conspicuously absent from covering Coates. That was left almost completely to online media, especially blogs. From curiosity, I watched NBC News primetime broadcast. Colbert was the lead story. There was no mention ever of Coates. And they wonder why their viewersehip is plummeting?


Fortunately and commendably for Colbert, his "testimony" was dripping with all the sober gravitas it deserved. . . .


Coates told the commission that he was testifying as a whistle blower since he had been instructed by his DOJ superiors not to speak.


You know, some more "zero tolerance" that this administration has for speaking truth to power, especially when the power is them and the truth is, well, the truth.

Read the whole thing.  Interesting take on Colbert's apparent realization that it was absurd that he had been asked to testify about immigration.

More on the Coates testimony.  Interesting links.   Possible legal ramifications for cases with minority plaintiffs.   Criticism of AP story, kudos for real journalism.

Josh Gerstein reports the story for Politico. Gerstein's story is a model of good journalism.

Background: Older posts on the New Black Panther case which Coates discussed in the hearing (and related issues of equality before the law) here, here and here.

Coates must be an extraordinarily strong individual to have remained in the DOJ after his demotion for supporting equality before the law. His testimony, against the orders of his superiors, probably ends any possibility that he could return to his career at the DOJ. But it was probably over before now, anyway. One of his subordinates had already quit to become a whistleblower. Going public may actually reduce the hostility which Coates must have been facing within the DOJ as a whistleblower. Here is an account of what he said at the going-away event at the time of his demotion.

Of course, there's a possibility that the Colbert appearance was not planned as a diversion, but was just another devastatiing unforced error by this Congress.

Nancy Pelosi on "Hollywood-American" Colbert: “He’s an American. He has a point of view.” From the comments:

“He’s an American. He has a point of view.” I thought Congress sought testimony from people with some expertise. There are fifty people in front of the local Home Depot who know more about this than Colbert.

Censorship in France and America

Andrew Klavan talks about censorship of his new book in France, then comments:

The book’s French cancellation is, I realize, a rather small cultural event. Yet it gives specific color to the recent revelations on the Daily Caller website that left-wing journalists conspired to suppress scandals that might harm Barack Obama and to the brouhaha over Breitbart’s online release of a video that resulted in a government worker’s momentarily losing her job. In both stories, one thing leaps out at me: everywhere, the Left favors fewer voices and less information, and conservatives favor more. Everywhere, the Left seeks to disappear its opposition, whereas the Right is willing to meet them head-on.

Take the e-mails that the Daily Caller obtained from the now-defunct lefty Web service Journolist. Never mind the personal or psychological implications of a radio producer who lovingly imagines Rush Limbaugh’s death or a law professor who doesn’t know that the FCC has no power to deprive Fox News of a license or a reporter who wants to smear Fred Barnes and other right-wing commentators as racist in order to distract the public from the hateful radicalism of Jeremiah Wright, then Obama’s pastor. The point is not these people’s animus or ignorance or wickedness. The point is that what they desired was not victory in open debate but silence—the silence of censorship, intimidation, or the grave.

When has Rush Limbaugh ever wished a liberal’s mouth closed forever? Really, who can deny that Rush would happily argue a point with absolutely anyone anywhere? When has Fox News ever done anything to its rival cable stations but trounce them in a free competition for ratings? When has Fred Barnes ever tried to bully or intimidate someone into shutting up?

And what about Breitbart? Did he, like many a daily journalist before him, momentarily put speed over full context in releasing an NAACP video? Perhaps. But Breitbart is the grassroots nemesis of vast media conglomerates that continually and purposefully ignore, suppress, and distort information unfriendly to their ideology: release and disclosure are his reasons for being. Breitbart routinely breaks important stories that the mainstream media won’t touch. “I don’t even know about it,” chuckled ABC News’s Charlie Gibson well after Breitbart revealed corruption at the left-wing activist organization Acorn. “I just didn’t know about it,” said Bob Schieffer of CBS after Breitbart and others had been hammering at possible wrongdoing at the Justice Department in a botched case against New Black Panther thugs. And I guess the networks just didn’t know when Breitbart decisively disproved allegations that Tea Partiers hurled racist insults at lawmakers—because they continued to spread the discredited smear.

Old-media pooh-bahs like former ABC anchor Ted Koppel lament the “good old days,” when three government-licensed networks served as gatekeepers to what the public could and couldn’t know. Breitbart, meanwhile, exhorts crowds of citizens to shoot videos and gather information, telling them, “You are the media now!” Breitbart only wants more information, while the left-wing media too often operate through obscurantism and suppression.

Read the whole thing.

Civil Rights Division of the DOJ "Lawless"?

It's not just refusal to support justice for all in the case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party. It's also refusal to enforce laws mandating that ineligible voters (dead, duplicate, etc.) be removed from voter rolls. Because the new goal of the Civil Rights Division in the Obama era is to increase voting by minorities - not to enforce the law. And removal of ineligible voters would decrease minority voting, or something. Is it all about maximizing the ACORN vote? ACORN is known for fraudulent voter registrations. Mr. Adams is very specific in his allegations. Watch the entire video.

“The real problem here, as I testified yesterday, is a lawlessness that’s in the Civil Rights Division that will enforce some laws and not others.”

Unfortunately, the literature on whistleblowing in general indicates that going to the media (even though Mr. Adams had to go to the "new media" in this case is about the only chance someone within a corrupt organization has of salvaging some part of their professional life after bringing to light corruption. For example, scientists who discover fraud are counseled by whistleblowing advisors not to reveal what they have discovered unless they are prepared to lose their family and have their career destroyed - particularly if the malfeasance is on the part of a superior. Note that J. Christian Adams' supervisor was removed from his post and is not allowed to testify to the Civil Rights Commission. His career at DOJ is probably effectively over as a result of his integrity. People who have already left the organization are at much less risk of personal destruction.

Based on personal (family) experience, I would counsel anyone who has discovered serious malfeasance within the organization where they work to leave the organization and become established in a new job before revealing the malfeasance. Maybe with the help of an attorney. It is also recommended that potential whistleblowers meet with friends and family first to warn them about the potential ramifications of blowing the whistle.