E.J. Dionne has not only devolved from a thoughtful columnist
into a left-wing hit-man, but he has devolved even further, into
the realm of a
flagrantly dishonest left-wing hit-man. Today’s column
contains falsehood after falsehood. First, he says the Sherrod
flap grew out of a “doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man
Andrew Breitbart.” Truth: The video was not doctored (it was an
excerpt), and wasn’t even excerpted by Breitbard himself. And
Breitbart himself used it in a way meant not to attack Sherrod
but to note the applause by the listeners, which was a legitimate
point. It was the NAACP and the Obama administration that
over-reacted; conservatives, to our credit, asked for more
context, and also provided fulsome, generous (perhaps even overly
generous) testimonials to the unfairness done to Sherrod.
Second, Dionne blames Fox News for the Obama administration’s
supposed projection about what Fox would do. As in: “The
first reaction of the Obama team was not to question, let alone
challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative
Fox News might create mattered more than anything else….”
Might create?!?! Give me a break. As has been
conclusively proved, other than one brief menton by Bill
O’Reilly, Fox ran ABSOLUTELY nothing on Sherrod until AFTER she
had been fired.
Dionne complains that last August, “an NBC News/Wall Street
Journal poll found that 45 percent of Americans thought the
reform proposals would likely allow ‘the government to make
decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the
elderly’.” What is wrong with that? That is or was a serious
concern, even more serious with Dr. “I love rationing” Berwick in
charge of CMS. Or is Donne going to call Nat
Hentoff a liar?
There really were “death
panels by proxy” in the bills. How about his own Washington
Post colleague
Charles Lane, formerly a major domo at the liberal The New
Republic? Here’s what Lane wrote: “Section 1233 goes beyond
facilitating doctor input to preferring it. Indeed, the measure
would have an interested party — the government — recruit
doctors to sell the elderly on living wills, hospice care and
their associated providers, professions and organizations. You
don’t have to be a right-wing wacko to question that approach.”
Then we get to Dionne’s account of the Black Panther case. He
writes: “This is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who
stopped no one from voting.” WRONG.Does Dionne ever actually do
his own research and read documents? Two different people, both
of them highly credible witnesses, including civil rights legend
Bartle Bull, swore under oath that they each saw three people
literally turn around and leave without voting after seeing the
Panthers.
Dionne reports Abigail Thernstrom’s charge that the other Civil
Rights Commissioners are motivated simply by wanting to “topple”
the Obama administration. But he doesn’t mention that each of the
five has denied the charge vociferously, nor does he explain why
their motivation has anything to do with what the actual facts
are, nor does he ask why Thernstrom spent six solid months
claiming that the case indeed was “blatant voter intimidation.”
Thernstrom herself acknowledged in April that at least three
voters “were intimidated…I mean I take seriously when
anybody is intimidated, and I’m not dismissing that experience of
theirs…but nevertheless, it seems to me the case of the New Black
Panther Party actually blocking people from voting would be
stronger if there were more than three people that we’re talking
about here.” In other words, she admitted voter intimidation, but
just argued that there weren’t MANY people who were
intimidated.
But the worst thing Dionne does is smear the whistle-blowing
attorney Christian Adams without ever talking with Adams and
without checking the record. He says Adams is not to be taken
seriously because he is supposedly a “Republican activist.” Oh?
Adams volunteered for Bush ballot security in 2004. Does that
make him a perjurer not to be taken seriously? What about his
long record of winning awards at DoJ? What about his work on
behalf of black voting rights in a major case in South Carolina?
What about the fact that just in April, the Obama-Holder Justice
Department gave him a promotion, and that he has sterling
performance reviews throughout his entire career at DoJ?
Then Dionne writes this passage that amounts to one big lie:
Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being
“motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of
the law.” This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated
nonsense — and it’s nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush
Limbaugh talk about it 1,000 times a day. When an outlandish
charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an
on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.
Nonsense? No evidence? There is Adams’ sworn testimony naming
names and at times dates; unless he perjured himself, that is
evidence. There are the lengthy reports of the
going-away speech by Adams’ colleague Chris Coates, a
longtime civil rights activist who once was a lead lawyer for the
ACLU. (The only reason Coates’ own testimony is not sworn is
because DoJ refused to let him testify.) There are Coates’
remarks when Adams left Justice, praising Adams’ integrity. There
are sworn affidavits from two other former DoJ lawyers backing up
the general thrust of Adams’ accounts. There are at least three
other public statements by other former DoJ officials backing teh
general thrust of Adams’ accounts, all on this point about
whether the Obamites will actually enforce the law against black
perpetrators, in defense of white (or other black but
right-leaning) victims. And there are a host of other pieces of
circumstantial evidence, as compiled by
this Washington Times editorial.
Now, it is perfectly legitimate for Dionne to look at all this
evidence and find it unconvincing, if he can argue against it, It
is not legitimate to say there is “no” evidence and to smear
Adams, a tremendously honorable man and somebody who Dionne’s
hero Thernstrom gave ample credit to in the acknowledgements
section of her last book. Why is it always, with the lefties,
that a whistle-blower from the right is immediately to be smeared
even though there is no evidence (and in this case, there really
is not a single shred of evidence that I know of — and I have
read hundreds, possibly thousands of pages of documents about
Adams and read all the lefty attacks on him, and none yet
provides evidence — that Adams has ever, once, at any time, been
accused of being professionally unethical, much less being a
perjurer. A lefty whistle-blower, on the other hand, is
immediately hailed by the Dionnes of the world (and, worse, by
supposedly straight news reporters), without question about their
motives or their actual records.
E.J. Dionne is a dishonest hack.
