Because we can't get enough of the black bogeyman.

In an effort to be fair and balanced, I am going to do a cut and paste job and post what a wingnut columnist wrote in my local paper.

Christine Flowers is a fellow member of the Philadelphia Bar. And, make no mistake, she is a wingnut. But to understand what goes on in the mind of the wingnut, you have to read folks like Christine Flowers.

" IN SPRING 1967, my father was a young lawyer trying to figure out what to do with rest of his professional life.

As an editor of Temple's Law Review, he had choices. But before embarking on a career that eventually led him to be named a "Legend of the Philadelphia Bar," Dad took a detour to Mississippi.

The year before Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, Tenn., Ted Flowers spent a summer registering African-Americans to vote and run for office in Copiah County. His journals tell tales that sound as if they were ripped from the pages of "To Kill a Mockingbird," including one incident he and some other lawyers experienced on the steps of a small courthouse:

"In the course of the next few seconds, we were called 'white n---s,' 'n--r lovers' and a few other names unworthy to print. I was amazed by all of this and couldn't help looking over at them. The expressions on their faces mirrored an intense hatred of us personally, and of everything we stood for. Even the small children seemed to wish us dead. It made me feel ill to know that there were people in America who differed very little in my judgment from those who manned Auschwitz in 1944."

I thought of Dad when I heard about what happened at a polling place in North Philly on Election Day 2008. Some militants of the New Black Panthers went to a polling place near the old Richard Allen Projects and strutted their stuff, complete with uniforms and billy clubs. Their clear intent was to intimidate people exercising their right to vote in what many called a historic election.

The story is old, but after a few brief mentions here at the time, people haven't heard much about it until recently. That's because the mainstream press, usually sensitive to the mere whiff of voter intimidation and ethnically insensitive behavior, basically dumped it.

Now, though, it (almost) can't avoid it. This week, a former career federal prosecutor appeared before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and talked about how the Obama Justice Department mishandled a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The irony is apparent: The black attorney general is in the cross hairs for failing to prosecute a case of racial intimidation that happened to occur on the day of the first black president's greatest glory.

J. Christian Adams resigned from the Justice Department in May to protest what he saw as a blatant violation of the department's responsibility to the American people - to enforce the laws in a race-neutral way.

In an article in the Washington Times, he described what happened when a DOJ headed by Eric Holder and filled with political appointees of a decidedly liberal stripe decided to derail the prosecution of the New Black Panthers, who had already been convicted by default by not even bothering to show up to defend themselves. Justice simply dropped the case, refusing to seek any criminal or civil penalties against all but one of the violators. Adams attributes this decision to "the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims."

WHILE THERE might have been legitimate reasons to derail the prosecution before convictions were obtained against the Panther defendants (although none is apparent in this case), there was absolutely no reasonable excuse for dropping claims that had already been won by the government, even if by default.

I tried to get an answer from the NAACP, since it's one of the foremost organizations in this country concerned with voter rights. I thought it might have some idea why Justice would decide to drop a case of voter intimidation after a significant victory.
Their response? "No comment." (Maybe not surprising, since Adams testified that the NAACP actually lobbied the Obama administration to drop the prosecution.)

Fact is, when reason goes out the window, conspiracy theory creeps in through the back door. The president and his crew have no one to blame but themselves for the impression they've created that they don't care about the civil rights of nonminorities, at least not at polling places. With no valid explanation for essentially letting a small band of domestic terrorists run wild on Election Day, you have to believe that this administration doesn't exactly see the Voting Rights Act the way my father did.
And that's a tragedy." [Article] For an added treat, please read the comments after the article.

Christie, your daddy seemed like a decent man. But, unfortunately, the apple fell very far from the tree. To compare two men standing with night sticks [AND LET'S GO OVER THIS AGAIN: THEY STOPPED NO ONE FROM VOTING ON THAT DAY!!!!] to what people went through during the struggle for civil rights in this country, only tarnishes your father's name and his legacy.

Shame on you for exploiting your father's work for the sake of scoring cheap political points! (Did you feel this strongly about voting rights when black folks were crying a river after Bush v. Gore?) But that's Christie; a partisan hack with an agenda. Even if it means using her daddy's memory to make her point.