Fortunately, the intellectual weight lies with the 200 pounds.

Here’s the deal: Two weeks (?) ago, Bob Schieffer at Face the Nation had Eric Holder as a guest and failed to even bring up the Black Panther voter-intimidation case. Others rightly “called out” Schieffer for the lapse, to which he responded that he just was unaware of the issue and that he would have asked about it if he had known.

So what is Face’s response? They now set up a show largely on the Panther issue (apparently)…. and stack the deck 4 to 1 against the notion that the case has any merit.

If this isn’t establishment media bias, then David Duke wasn’t a KKK member.

Here is Sunday’s lineup of panelist (in addition to the vaguely left-leaning Schieffer as the host): On one side, radical black lefties Cornell West and Michael Eric Dyson. On the other….. oops, I mean on the SAME side, two putatively conservative guests whose role is to trash the conservative position. There is Abby Thernstrom, the Civil Rights Commissioner who has made a major vendetta of trashing the Panther case that she once supported. And there is Michael Gerson, who makes a habit of sneering at other conservatives and who just this week described the Panther case this way: Fox News obsessively played video showing two members of the New Black Panthers wearing military gear outside a Philadelphia polling station in 2008, one carrying a nightstick. Voter intimidation is a serious thing and a federal crime. But two men engaged in revolutionary political theater do not a conspiracy make. These reactions are disproportionate… 

In other words, Gerson made fun of the whole issue.

So on the Panther case, there are four people to trash the case that Face ignored for more than a year. Aligned against those four is….

One man. Four on one. That’s about as fair as asking Shirley Temple to wrestle Hulk Hogan, with Temple’s right arm tied behind her back.

Or at least it would be unfair except for the identity of that one. On the side of thinking the Panther case is indeed important is none other than WSJer and  AmSpec senior editor John Fund, one of the savviest analysts around and one of the most knowledgeable on vote fraud and related voting issues in general, and on the Panther case in particular. (In a recent blog post listing the journalists who kept this story alive for a year, I forgot to list John; I was in a rush. But he has been superb all along; witness this column from last summer.)

Here is a vote for expecting Fund to mop the floor with the other four. But it’s also a vote for blasting Face the Nation for its sickening attempt to rig the deck.

UPDATE: I was having so much fun with that post that I forgot to add the really sober, thoughtful, larger analysis of the larger meta-issue that was published today by Jen Rubin. Do read the link!.