On the day President Obama was elected, armed men wearing the black berets and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were stationed at the entrance to a polling place in Philadelphia. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters and poll watchers. After the election, the Justice Department brought a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and those armed thugs. I and other Justice attorneys diligently pursued the case and obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the charges. Before a final judgment could be entered in May 2009, our superiors ordered us to dismiss the case.
The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.
I already got into the Black Panther thing here, linking to a TPM post which pretty much blew the whole “controversy” to bits, though, being a true “zombie lie,” I expect this to keep getting resuscitated by the wingnutosphere on a fairly frequent basis (and I really could care less about Adams quitting – I’m sure he’ll be employed with some cushy right-wing think tank before too much longer).
However, the real reason why I’m saying anything about this at all is because of this piece of nonsense from Adams’s column today…
Some have called the actions in Philadelphia an isolated incident, not worthy of federal attention. To the contrary, the Black Panthers in October 2008 announced a nationwide deployment for the election. We had indications that polling-place thugs were deployed elsewhere, not only in November 2008, but also during the Democratic primaries, where they targeted white Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters. In any event, the law clearly prohibits even isolated incidents of voter intimidation.
Using that Google thingie, I performed some random searches and found absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support this claim (aside from hysteria at sites linking to Adams). None.
However, I did find out the following about Adams (here)…
Adams was hired to the Civil Rights Division in 2005 by Bradley Schlozman, the Bush appointee who, as acting head of the division in 2006, was found to have violated rules against politicized hiring, then lied to Congress about it.
Adams is also a former volunteer with the right-wing National Republican Lawyers Association, which has criticized the Obama Justice Department for dropping the New Black Panther case.
And in 2004, as a Bush campaign poll watcher in Florida, Adams publicly criticized a black couple that refused to accept a provisional ballot, after election officials said they had no record of the couple’s change of address forms, Bloomberg reported. Voters had been warned not to accept provisional ballots, because of the risk that they could later be discounted.
This whole “Black Panther” thing is an utter farce, treated seriously by news organizations which, if they were doing anything close to what their jobs purport to be, would have blown it to bits long ago.
Update 7/3/10: More on Adams here…
This blurring of racial and ethnic lines (in our political campaigns) is, for the most part, deeply inspiring, the manifestation of hard-won progress. Race has not exactly been a nonfactor in Ms. Haley’s campaign (one Republican called her and Mr. Obama “ragheads”), but she has spent a lot more of her energy refuting accusations about her sex life — an intimation of scandal that is thoroughly egalitarian.
The peril for candidates aspiring to a kind of post-racial identity, however, is that they defy our inclination to cast politicians as protagonists. “If you’re going to tell people who you are, then you’ve got to tell them your story,” (former presidential candidate Michael) Dukakis says now. Minus the continual telling and retelling of the story, voters may like what you signify as a politician, but they may find it harder, when times get rough, to assume your authenticity.
And so, over the course of the last several weeks, commentators have taken to portraying Mr. Obama as clinical and insufficiently emotive, which is really just another way of saying the president is not really knowable. It is a caricature his opponents can exploit in part because a lot of voters remain murky on his cultural identity.
“Obama is detached from the American experience,” Rick Santorum, the former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, told a blog called the Iowa Republican on Monday. “He just doesn’t identify with the average American because of his own background — Indonesia and Hawaii.”
It was a dubious remark, heavy with racial implications.
I don’t mean to dignify the idiocy of Rick Santorum by quoting him here, or echoing the meely-mouthed concerned trolling of Matt Bai, but on the subject of voters “remain(ing) murky on (Obama’s) cultural background,” I give you this from Think Progress, which tells us that 24 percent of those polled believe Number 44 was born outside of the U.S.
It’s almost not even worth responding to anymore, really.
Oh, and on the subject of diversity in politics, Bai cites the following joke once told on the campaign trail by The Gipper himself in 1980 (here)…
“How do you tell the Polish (guy) at a cockfight? He’s the one with a duck.”
“How do you tell the Italian (guy)? He’s the one who bets on the duck.”
“How do you know the Mafia is involved? The duck wins.”
And of course, The Sainted Ronnie R was just full of outrage because people believed that he thought the joke was funny, even though he said, “I don’t like that type of humor.”
Sure…
Greenwald–who, so far as I can tell, only regards the United States as a force for evil in the world…
I have to back up a bit here and explain that columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, one of our most notorious and unapologetic Iraq war cheerleaders, beat up on David Weigel, who resigned from the Washington Post after some Emails that were assumed to be on a private listserv were obtained by Tucker Carlson and other conservative miscreants and made public. Glenn Greenwald then went after Goldberg, and now, Klein has gone after Greenwald (you can read what Klein says and Greenwald’s typically thorough response here…kind of hard to summarize all of Greenwald’s details in this post).
Oh, and one more thing, Joe…
If you’re going to say anything about Weigel, the least you can do is spell his name right.
Posted by doomsy 
The Liberal Doomsayer 