Department of Justice: We hire Commies now!

Man, the Stephen Colbert thing must have been an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats: it actually shoved the Christopher Coates testimony on the New Black Panther Party situation onto the front page of the Washington Post.  And not in an uniformly favorable way to the Department of Justice.

To do a quick review: back in 2008 a couple of Black Panthers engaged in a little voter intimidation in Philadelphia on Election Day.  The Department of Justice went after that, it being against the law and everything… and then got told by the new administration in 2009 that only white people were going to be acceptable defendants of civil rights violations investigations done by the DoJ.  We will now pause while the Left pretends that they are outraged, shocked, and indignant at the above.  Well, they might be outraged: being a yellow-jacket doesn’t mean that you personally enjoy getting stung yourself.  Quite the opposite, really.

Moving along, there’s been a steadily-growing controversy over the whole situation, and Coates’s testimony yesterday was a bombshell.  Coates – who, as the WaPo itself notes, is a Clinton appointee with ties to the ACLU – essentially said everything that I did in the last paragraph, only much more formally, and with names liberally named.  Which is why the front page, and not, say, the ombudsman’s; Christopher Coates is not an easy figure to dismiss.  Although I expect that there’s a staffer over at MMfA, OfA, or the DNC with a new weekend project. Continue reading Department of Justice: We hire Commies now!

#rsrh Wrong question on the WaPo’s Black Panther problem.

[Odd: this should have published two days ago.]

(Via Hot Air Headlines) The question is not, actually, “What took them so long?”  We know the answer already: the WaPo thought that they could make the voter intimidation story go away by ignoring it.  No, the question is, “Now that they’ve admitted that the story isn’t going away, why isn’t the below on the front page?”

The story has its origins on Election Day in 2008, when two members of the New Black Panther Party stood in front of a Philadelphia polling place. YouTube video of the men, now viewed nearly 1.5 million times, shows both wearing paramilitary clothing. One carried a nightstick.

Early last year, just before the Bush administration left office, the Justice Department filed a voter-intimidation lawsuit against the men, the New Black Panther Party and its chairman. But several months later, with the government poised to win by default because the defendants didn’t contest the suit, the Obama Justice Department decided the case was over-charged and narrowed it to the man with the nightstick. It secured only a narrow injunction forbidding him from displaying a weapon within 100 feet of Philadelphia polling places through 2012.

Actually, we know the answer to that, too: The WaPo still wants the story to go away.  They figure that they can point to the Ombudsman and claim that they’ve addressed their inability to tell people, you know, the news.

Moe Lane

PS: It’s actually at least as important a story as, I don’t know, Bob McDonnell’s college thesis.  Excuse me: GOVERNOR Bob McDonnell’s college thesis.

#rsrh Things got worse for NBPP apologists.

They may think that things got better, now that there’s apparently this big brouhaha over who is politicizing what in the DoJ/CCR dispute over the way the former let the NBPP walk away from sanctions voter intimidation. Nope! They got worse. Do you know why they got worse? Because now it’s becoming a mess. And do you know how they resolve messes in Dizzy City, particularly when high-ranking members of the opposition party are raising a stink?

Allahpundit knows:

Time for a special prosecutor to resolve the facts, perhaps?

If you didn’t wince, congratulations: you have not been captured by the Beltway yet. If you did, look on the bright side: it’s going to blow up in the Democrats’ faces this time. If you’re unhappy about that, well: kharma. It’s what’s for dinner; and besides, you can always get vicarious revenge in the next Republican administration. That’s how these things invariably go, really.

Moe Lane

PS: If you suspect that all of this means that I think that special prosecutors are a dumb idea in general… yup, I do.  Because they are.