Crossing The Rubin Con, Or WaPo On WaPo Violence

My problems with Jennifer Rubin, recently of Commentary Magazine and now promoted upward to the Washington Post, are well documented.  Adam Serwer is apparently as sick of Rubin as I am, and today he uses his own spot on Greg Sargent's Washington Post column to demolish Rubin's latest claim about the New Black Panther Party and Eric Holder, and does so with considerable skill.

Republican congressmen Lamar Smith and Darrell Issa are literally accusing the Obama administration of favoring "a political ally -- the New Black Panther Party." Think about that for a second: Republicans are casually suggesting, with a straight face, that the Obama administration is "allied" with members of an anti-white hate group. Never mind that one of the men charged in the 2008 incident, King Samir Shabazz, once described Obama as "the next slavemaster" and a "puppet on a string." The thinking seems to be that because the attorney general and the president are black, and black people -- or black Democrats -- all are filled with seething hatred for whites and an unquenchable thirst for vengeance over past wrongs, they must be in alliance. It's idiotic on its face.

Furthermore, the Justice Department did not "dismiss" the case. Rather, it decided -- in the absence of any evidence of a nationwide plot by the NBPP to intimidate white voters -- to narrow the civil charges and obtain an injunction against the one NBPP member that actually had a weapon.

Rubin mentions the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report -- without noting that then-President George W. Bush gamed the system to stack the panel with Republican partisans. The one actual voting rights expert on the panel, Republican Abigail Thernstrom, has called the entire issue a right-wing effort to "topple" the Obama administration.

Rubin also asserts as fact that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes "instructed Department attorneys not to pursue cases against African American defendants," but the two conservative former Justice Department attorneys who leveled those charges give completely different accounts of the incident, with one saying that Fernandes said the Civil Rights Division was in the business of doing "traditional civil rights work," which he interpreted as "helping minorities." Rubin also neglects to note that the voting section has already intervened on behalf of white voters against a black defendant.

She calls the case a "blatant case of voter intimidation," but no actual voters have come forward to complain, even after the deluge of coverage. Let's face it: If the OPR/IG investigations of the case come back without evidence of politicization, conservatives won't drop the subject -- they'll simply argue that this proves the Obama DoJ is politicized and they'll demand further investigations.

Rubin is not the real target of Serwer's indignation, but she certainly set him off with this sloppy column and Rubin's screed so perfectly encapsulates the winger talking points on the column that it turns into a deconstruction of the larger NBPP issue quite nicely.  Do yourself a favor and read the entire Serwer post. 

The NBPP/Obama/Eric Holder conspiracy triangle is such mind-numbing garbage that it's borderline racist and more than a little stupid, and yet to see Rubin still pushing this nonsense is insulting across the board.  Good for Serwer to step up and deal with her continued hackery, and in the Post itself, no less.

There's no "there" there.