Barack Obama's United States Department of UnCivil Rights

The latest, but surely not last, race-based Obama fiasco is in progress right now.  You undoubtedly know that Barack nominated Debo Adegbile, former special counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to be assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and that the Senate blocked the nomination.  Even seven Democrat senators couldn’t stomach voting to affirm Adegbile who not only wrote a legal brief that helped get convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal off death row but who also went to France to participate in several rallies in support of Mumia.

The National Fraternal Order of Police had accused Debo of taking a "cynical race-baiting approach to our legal system" and regarded his nomination as "a thumb in the eye of our nation's law enforcement.  It demonstrates a total lack of regard or empathy for those who strive to keep you and everyone else in our nation safe in your home and neighborhoods." 

Debo Adegbile’s choice, however, is totally consistent with Obama’s selective approach to civil rights.  He and his Office of Civil Rights carefully consider every racial angle of every racial incident involving blacks and whites.  When blacks are racially victimized Obama and his group strike like cobras, but when whites are victimized Obama and his group slink like sloths. 

Adegbile would have been a perfect racially-biased assistant to Attorney General Eric Holder who refused to prosecute the new Black Panthers after they threatened white voters in Philadelphia during Obama’s 2008 presidential election. Holder's disregard for white voters' rights apparently was shared by some members of "his" Justice Department. Speaking of the New Black Panther intimidation of white voters, Christopher Coates, a long-time Justice Department lawyer, testified On September 25, 2010, "I had people [in the Department] who told me point-blank that [they] didn't come to the voting rights section to sue African American people."

On March 1, 2011, when questioned about the New Black Panther case, Holder dismissed the significance of white voter intimidation on racial grounds—what else—saying “Think about that. When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia—which was inappropriate, certainly that…to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my [emphasis added] people." More than merely refusing to defend white voters, then, Holder was indignant, almost irate.  How dare you, he implied, expect me to defend YOUR particular white people in 2011 when in 1960 some of MY black people somewhere had their voting rights threatened.  Perhaps Eric also felt that today's whites should be refused service in restaurants because some blacks were so refused in the 1950s.

Like Eric Holder, Barack Obama has repeatedly demonstrated a racially jaundiced view of justice in which he confounds the present with the past.  Recall how quick Barack was to assert that white Sgt. James Crowley "acted stupidly" when he subdued the out-of-control Henry Louis Gates Jr, in July 2009 during the infamous Cambridge, Massachusetts incident.  Also remember that the President personally phoned Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie in 2010 to praise him for signing convicted dog killer Mick Vick to a six-year, $100 million contract at the quarterback position. Both the Gates and Vick situations warranted Obama's attention because the President viewed both in terms of race: Gates was a black man in a historically white neighborhood and Vick, a black man in a historically white dominated football position.   

            

So Barack Obama and Eric Holder choose to view justice through the rear-view mirror of the past rather than the window of the present.  Obama would rather slap the National Fraternal Order of Police in the face than find an appropriate attorney general candidate for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.  Of course, I am white; perhaps white bias motivates me to accuse our beloved President of having a racist agenda.

I can provide two quick examples showing that opposition to Obama's "justice" policies is not a simple white vs. black issue.  First, appearing on Special Report with Bret Baier (March 7, 2014) black Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal said this about the President's choice of Debo Adegbile: "The administration already has enough race baiters, starting with the President himself, continuing to Eric Holder, his Attorney General.  The Senate knew not to add to their ranks."  And second, defending the choice of Debo, white Patrick Leahy, Democratic senator from Vermont, like Obama and Holder, gazed into the rear-view mirror of the past to suggest that Debo was being treated like black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall had been in the 1960s.

Civil rights in 20014 America, then, is not confined to rational discussion of the present.  Taking their cue from Barack Obama, anyone, black or white, can obfuscate current racial reality by reminding discussants of past racial injustice.  By living in the past instead of the present, the race mongers delude themselves into believing that they are pro-black crusaders, fighting for truth and "justice."  They fail to realize that the more they manipulate race, allegedly in the service of blacks, the more they encourage white backlash and impede black progress.