The White House and the Black Panthers: How the Media's Pro-Obama Bias Hurts America

Obama’s Con-Man-in-Chief, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, has told a reporter, to say the least implausibly, that he has not “paid any attention” to former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams’s shocking (and corroborated) revelations that the president’s appointees at DOJ…

• abandoned a slam-dunk voter intimidation case for racial reasons against the New Black Panther Party, a virulent hate group whose members have long been known for anti-white rants, death threats, and even praise of Osama Bin Laden;

• instructed lawyers in its civil rights division to disregard cases that involve black defendants and white victims;

• directed Voter Section employees not to ensure, as required by law, that no ineligible voters were on the rolls, even though there is evidence that illegal aliens and immigrants with green cards are committing rampant voter fraud in the U.S.; and

• is now considering a submission by Ike Brown, a Democratic Party Chairman in Mississippi, to run elections in Mississippi, even though a federal court already stripped him of that authority after he victimized minority white voters and otherwise prevented people from voting based on their party loyalties.

For the most part the progressive media, in step with Gibbs, have brushed off Adams’s momentous testimony – momentous because it suggests Obama’s DOJ to be infected with a monstrous black nationalist ideology not unlike that of Obama’s longtime mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

For example, these media have passed over Rep. Frank Wolf’s ongoing efforts to draw attention to the New Black Panther case, in light of Adams’s allegations. Undoubtedly his most recent action, a letter imploring the DOJ Inspector General to launch an investigation into the handling of the case, will likewise not get covered.

When progressive pundits have deigned to take note of this story, they have bent over backwards, in more or less blatant ways, to demonize Adams and his defenders by attacking their motives, thereby deflecting scrutiny and blame away from the administration.

To the Huffington Post‘s Earl Ofari Hutchinson, for instance, Adams’s testimony is part of a vast conservative conspiracy to stir up, for political gain, the “hysteria and borderline racism” of white male, blue collar, non-college educated voters and others of their ilk. In this telling, conservatives are pulling off a vicious “con” that consists in labeling Obama a “reverse racist” set on revenge against whites for evil deeds against blacks:

Adams, Limbaugh, the tea party activists, and GOP leaders have crudely but effectively programmed millions to think of and see Obama as their worst racial nightmare. To them, he’s a black man who has real power and will lord it over whites. It’s the worst kind of con, but for the Obama loathers selling the con is all that matters.

More subtly, that is, more adeptly giving at least the appearance of objectivity, the New York Times weighed in on the story, conveying its essential facts, including even the inconvenient existence (for those defending Obama’s DOJ) of threatening images in a video of New Black Panther men in paramilitary dress, with one sporting a billy club, standing outside a polling place.

But, bolstering Victor Davis Hanson’s point that the “After Bush” period is for the Obama forces always and forever prime “Blame Bush” time, Times reporter Charlie Savage spins the New Black Panther case as one “that has been used as political ammunition against the Obama administration by some conservative media outlets seeking to flip the script on portrayals of the Bush administration as having ‘politicized’ the Justice department.”

In face, it is Savage who is flip-flopping away from the real issue, the present DOJ’s wrongdoing, by packing his article with anti-Bush innuendo. While cutting out crucial aspects of Adams’s testimony, he labors to stress that:

• Adams was hired during the Bush administration.

• It was less than two weeks before the Bush administration left office that the civil rights division invoked a rarely used section of the Voting Rights Act to file a civil lawsuit alleging voter intimidation

• There were widespread allegations that the Bush administration had politicized the civil rights division… [E]nforcement of certain anti-discrimination laws dropped significantly, and… political appointees systematically steered career jobs to conservatives in violation of civil service laws.

• Incidents similar to the Black Panther case took place in the Bush years in which minorities were the alleged victims but the division did not file such a lawsuit.

• And, according to a Democratic member of the Commission on Civil Rights, Michael Yaki, the group’s investigation of the New Black Panther case is “incredibly shallow, expensive, and partisan” and a “one-sided farce.”

Karl Rove’s retort to the White House’s studied cluelessness in this affair was spot on. He accused Obama of “thumbing his nose” at one of Americans’ most basic rights, voting. The progressive media have colluded in this latest example of unprincipled, untruthful trampling of our democracy and freedom.

Adams’s indictment of the DOJ exposes once again the profound and destructive crisis of contemporary American progressivism or liberalism. The latter, as Charles R. Kesler shows in his recent essay, “The New New Deal” “can no longer understand, or defend, its principles as true… Liberals are increasingly left with an amoral paradigm that is hard to justify to themselves, much less to the American public. The problem for liberals today it that they risk becoming confidence men, and nothing but confidence men.”