A conservative dismisses right-wing Black Panther 'fantasies'
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- Abigail Thernstrom makes a dramatic break from her usual allies. Composite image by POLITICO
But the wide exposure given the controversy, said one member of the Civil Rights Commission, was reason enough for the Justice Department to pursue the case aggressively.
“Millions of people saw the clip on Fox News and YouTube,” said Todd Gaziano, a commissioner who has been the driving force behind the commission’s investigation. “Any reasonable American knows this is voter intimidation. And so the dismissal itself of an infamous case where there’s footage is more damaging to people’s perception of the rule of law than a dismissal when nobody’s paying attention.”
The commission chairman, Gerald Reynolds, said Thernstrom is attacking the commission out of pique dating back to a dispute about organizing a conference scheduled for this fall. “The allegation that there’s any interest in bringing down the Obama administration is false — and it’s a lot more; it’s personal and petty.”
Thernstrom, who had openly mocked the commission’s hearing on the case, put her dissent in writing last week in National Review, where she said the incident was “racial theater of very minor importance” and “small potatoes.”
And other conservatives have weighed in on her side.
“There are more important issues to go after Attorney General Holder on even in terms of the voting rights section itself,” said Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, who was staff director of the Civil Rights Commission in the Reagan years and called the video “damning” but relatively minor.
“Because it’s 24-hour news and cable news and Fox News — this is the kind of story, like the ACORN story, that’s got pictures that you can run over and over again,” said Chavez, who noted that she’s a Fox News contributor.
“When it comes to race, the right, like the left, can't resist getting hung up with trivia and sideshows,” said Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of an influential book arguing that discrimination against blacks is no longer very meaningful. “How do the antics of these two Black Panthers make a difference?”
A leading writer on the widely read HotAir marveled at Fox’s eagerness to offer a platform to the New Black Panther Party’s ranting chairman, Malik Shabazz, crediting it to the fact that the “outrageous outrage he provokes is good for ratings and partly because, as here, his demagoguery necessarily casts the host in the role of Spokesman for Decency."
And Doug Mataconis of the conservative blog Outside the Beltway called the flap “much ado about very, very little.”
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