The cheapest, most trite, and most vilely dishonest refuge of a
leftist sycophant is to suggest that conservatives’ motives are
racist. It’s an especially tawdry trick when it’s used to hide
racialist
(note the difference between the two words) actions by their lefty
brethren. In that context, meet Adam Serwer, hack scribe for the
American Prospect and blogger for the Washington
Post, who won’t answer substantive
correctives to his own flawed work but who repeatedly makes
bald
assertions, without evidence, that conservatives long for the
days of Jim Crow — or maybe apartheid. The truth, however, is that
the conservatives and centrists fighting for election integrity and
equal enforcement of the law have impeccable records on civil
rights, while the Obama Justice Department for which Serwer so
avidly covers up has a demonstrable record of mendacity,
lawlessness and bias.
Serwer ordinarily wouldn’t be worth bothering with, except
insofar as his idiocies provide a case study of how left repeatedly
uses the wolf-cry of conservative racism (see:
Obama says Tea Party is racist) to poison the well — yes,
destroy the “civility” — of public discourse.
Serwer’s
March 9 post accusing Republicans of a War on Voting was
typical. He starts right in like this (my emphasis added): “The GOP
generally supports felony disenfranchisement laws because they
disproportionately affect blacks who tend to vote for
Democrats.” How does he know this is the motive? He doesn’t
say. What evidence does he cite? He doesn’t. He just makes the
blanket assertion, unmoored to any actual facts. Or maybe the right
isn’t purely racist, but still vilely political: “Florida
Republicans are moving to restrict the voting power of a Democratic
constituency in a presidential swing state, nothing more, nothing
less.” Then this: “Republican legislatures all over the country are
actively pursuing policies that could disenfranchise thousands of
people because they are more likely to vote for the other side.”
This is actually somewhat less offensive an allegation as the ones
from earlier columns that there is a “feverish alternate universe
of racial resentment in which some conservatives seem to reside”
and that “conservatives’ priorities here speak for themselves, and
they aren’t what anyone could describe as ‘race-neutral’.” Finally,
the real aim of conservatives, he has written, is “discrediting the
whole concept of civil rights enforcement.”
This is slander, pure and simple. Why the Washington
Post allows it, even in its blogging pages, is a mystery. It’s
also absurd.
In his most recent column Serwer again insinuates that
these supposedly bad motives are the key explanation for why
“Republicans treat the New Black Panther voter intimidation case as
an outrage.” Okay, fine: Let’s examine the history of those on the
right and center who have
insisted on keeping the Black Panther case — and, more
importantly, the window it opens into Justice Department
mis-practices — in the public eye.
Start with the first key witness to the
Black Panther intimidation at the Philadelphia polling place. (This
aspect of the case has been well publicized, but please bear with
me.) Bartle Bull, who called the Panther incident “the most blatant
form of voter intimidation I’ve ever seen,” was a Bobby Kennedy
lieutenant who did legal work for black civil rights activists in
Mississippi in the 1960s. He was a former owner/publisher of the
left-wing Village Voice, and Ted Kennedy himself gave Bull
a gold medal in 2003 for his civil rights work. Yet, to believe
Serwer, Bull is at least knowingly in league with those whose goal
is “discrediting the whole concept of civil rights enforcement.”
Right.
And who might those evil, anti-civil rights crusaders be?
Well, of course, there is the original whistle-blower, J. Christian
Adams, mortally suspect because, gasp, he was hired at DoJ
(as a non-political career attorney) during the Bush
administration. Worse, Adams went to law school in South Carolina.
Oh, he must be a racist. None of which, though, squares with the
facts of his record at the Civil Rights Division of DoJ. It was a
record of consistently good reviews, cash awards for excellent
work, and promotions — including a promotion, signed off on by the
Obama appointees, just weeks before he resigned in protest. Most to
the point, Adams won a special commendation for his work on behalf
of black voters in Georgetown County, South Carolina.
One of his colleagues on the immediate attorney team on
the Black Panther case, Robert Popper, also won a special
commendation from DoJ, his for work enforcing the part of the
“Motor Voter” law allowing welfare recipients to register to vote
at government aid offices. Then there was the top attorney on the
team, fellow whistle-blower Christopher Coates. As has by now been
well-publicized, Coates is no Kluxer . A former staff attorney
for the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project (gee, how reactionary!) and
winner of the Thurgood Marshall Decade
Award from the
Georgia NAACP in 1991, his career within DoJ on behalf of civil
rights was similarly distinguished, including selection for the
Walter Barnett Memorial Award for Excellence and
Advocacy.
In Congress, the chief pursuer of answers about the
Panther case has been Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., who once bucked the
entire rest of the Virginia delegation and Cavalier State
newspapers to support civil rights legislation. On the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission, all five of the commissioners pushing the
investigation into the skullduggery have distinguished records.
Probably the most vociferous driver of the inquiry was Todd
Gaziano, who started his career on the staff of (and served as
official biographer for) liberal Democratic Sen. Jennings Randolph
of West Virginia, who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 even
as fellow Mountaineer State Democrat Robert Byrd filibustered the
bill for 14 straight hours. Fellow commissioner Gail Heriot started
her career by clerking for Illinois Supreme Court Justice Seymour
Simon, aptly described in the Chicago Tribune as a
“liberal Democratic icon.” The three other commissioners — Gerald
Reynolds, Peter Kirsanow, and Ashley Taylor — all happen to be
black men. Unless one believes in the mythical self-hating black
man along with mermaids and centaurs and the Gorgons, it’s hard to
believe they are out to disenfranchise black voters. All three
boast tremendously distinguished legal careers, and all have
steadfastly insisted that the Obama/Holder team’s conduct in the
Panther case has been abominable.
Finally, while a column should not be about the columnist,
I feel compelled to note that no professional journalist has
written more words on the Panther case than I have, ever since I
helped break the story on May 29 2009. (Credit where due: I
later found out that the indefatigable
Michelle Malkin broke the story in cyber-print a day earlier.)
And I’ll take a back seat to nobody on fighting for black rights
and interests. Among a much longer list of activities I could cite,
I served as a leader on three different fronts of the effort to
stop the then-meteoric political rise in Louisiana of former KKK
Gran Wizard David
Duke — including being on the original ten-person board of the
Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which earned
international acclaim for its successful work against Duke. As a
columnist in Mobile, Alabama, I crusaded against white racism in
the private sector, repeatedly took up the cause (when almost
nobody else would) of the overwhelmingly black town of Prichard
(which had gone bankrupt but which I argued could make a comeback),
and tacitly endorsed black Democrat Sam Jones to be mayor of
majority-white Mobile over a white Republican — and wrote about it
at the New Republic.
If just one or even two people heavily involved in
investigating the Black Panther case had a decent civil rights
history, perhaps Serwer could explain away that record and still
assert that the overall effort was born of malicious racial intent.
He cannot, however, explain away all of this. Those of us who
focused so hard on this case — and, more importantly, on the far
broader issue of race-based double standards and mal-enforcement of
the law at the Obama/Holder DoJ — have long, long résumés proving
sincere concern for minority rights and interests, and opposition
to rubbing racial resentments raw. We also repeatedly have cited
have cited
facts and
narratives that consistently have proved
true, while critics of the case have repeatedly refused to
address key issues and/or ignored their own previous statements
about the seriousness and appallingness of the various issues
involved.
In Serwer’s fevered imagination, though, we’re all
racists. In his warped mind, there can be no explanation for our
positions other than racial animus or political advantage. We
cannot be sincere.
“Felony disenfranchisement laws,” he writes, “serve no
civic purpose — no one ever stopped themselves from committing a
crime simply because they might lose the right to vote. The
formerly incarcerated have served their time, the argument for
punishing them post-release by denying them the right to vote is
pure politics masquerading as tough-on-crime moral uprightness [sic
— run-on sentence].”
Does it never occur to him that conservatives actually
believe that felonies are disqualifying, in themselves, from the
full privileges of citizenship, at least until further proof of
reform has been shown? Across the board, conservatives tend to
treat felonies as less forgivable than liberals do. Our entire
worldview is less forgiving of violent law-breaking, and less
willing to ascribe such grave transgressions to “cultural
influences” or poverty or “youthful mistakes” or other nonsense.
Why should conservatives believe any differently when it comes to
voting rights than we do when it comes to being otherwise tough on
serious crime? When it comes to voting privileges after
incarceration, it would indeed be philosophically inconsistent for
us not to insist that those privileges must be re-earned.
Just because somebody has spent time behind bars doesn’t mean he
has proved to be a good citizen; only once he has been back in the
world of freedom without further transgressions has he proved he
again merits the sacred right to vote on how our government will be
run.
Yet to Serwer, we just want to suppress Democratic votes.
That’s offensive.
Typically, though, Serwer is so sloppy that he can’t even
bother to check the few apparent factoids he cites in his otherwise
fact-less rant. “Florida’s original felony disenfranchisement law”
he writes, “was enacted during Reconstruction, as an effort to
limit the political power of newly freed blacks.”
Balderdash. In the key case on just this topic,
Johnson (et al) v. Governor of Florida in the
11th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2005, the full circuit
en banc overwhelmingly rejected this ahistorical tommyrot.
“There is no doubt,” they wrote, “that Florida’s decision to adopt
a criminal disenfranchisement law in these early Constitutions was
based on a non-racial rationale…. Indeed, the plaintiffs’
own historical expert conceded that prior to the instant case, no
historian who had studied Florida’s 1868 Constitution had ever
contemplated that the 1868 criminal disenfranchisement provision
was enacted with discriminatory intent. The plaintiffs offer no
contemporaneous evidence from the 1868 constitutional convention
demonstrating that racial discrimination motivated the enactment of
the 1868 disenfranchisement provision.”
In short, Serwer has no leg to stand on. All he does is
attack, without balance, fairness or accuracy, but with plenty of
demonstrable mendacity. He does the same when he falsely claims
that “in-person voting fraud is virtually nonexistent.” (Oh,
really??)
His cheap shots would be laughable if they weren’t so
indicative of how the left and their establishment media
cheerleaders (sorry for the redundancy) heaps the same calumny on
conservatives every chance they get. It’s long past time we fight
back — and long past time for the serious journalists at places
like the Washington Post to stop allowing even so much as
an inch of their cyber-print to those of Serwer’s low
ilk.
