Because of this video of these two guys standing in their silly Halloween costumes in 2008 outside a polling station, they were prosecuted for voter intimidation. BLACK PANTHERS! DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNN. Yet now that black man Eric Holder (who is A BLACK MAN) is Attorney General, black people can get away with such things, as these men have now, as they are no longer being prosecuted. This has riled up conservatives for being an example of “reverse racism.” This is what happens when you let BLACK PEOPLE run our judiciary system. They give preferential treatment to silly black men in anachronistic costumes, when they should be doing their jobs, which is putting any and all black men behind bars.
The Washington Examiner lets us in on the dealio, yo-yo yo:
The evidence at hand in Philadelphia includes video of two thuggish African-American men dressed in military fatigues.
We’ll stop you there, Washington Examiner, as that seems like a very, very inoffensive sentence.
Now a prosecutor named J. Christian Adams has resigned over this, calling it “the clearest case of voter intimidation that I’ve seen since I’ve been practicing law.” J. Christian Adams is not a very WASPy name, so you can tell he has a lot of street cred when he is saying this. And as you assume correctly, people in America are constantly using their spare time to intimidate voters, so J. Christian Adams has seen many, many cases of voter intimidation in his career.
It is very difficult to look at this video, however, and think that these “Black Panthers” are intimidating. People just seem to be confused as to why this guy is saying crazy stuff and wearing this weird uniform get-up. But if you are a conservative blogger, every single person in this video is absolutely menacing (black), so you would be intimidated and not vote if you saw one near your polling place. Thankfully, though, they don’t have black people where conservative bloggers live. [Washington Examiner]
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“This new Panther version of Black Power does not include white participation.” Like the old one did? King Shabazz says, “I hate white people, all of them.” Me too!
Free Huey!
What now?
This has riled up conservatives for being an example of “reverse racism.”
Question: if this is “referse racism”, then what sort of racism was it when the Bush DoJ declined to prosecute militia-type people for showing up to “guard” the “polls” from Messikins, with guns?/a> Which, unlike this, people actually did complain about?
Was that just the plain ol’ regular kind of racism? Or are we still doing the thing where every instance of “reverse racism” is something that wouldn’t even be a blip on peoples’ racism radars, if the races of the relevant parties were actually reversed? I’m so confused here.
How dare the Department of Justice not move forward in a politically motivated prosecution of these two men just because they didn’t commit a crime? Holder should know that the main purpose of the DoJ is supposed to be to make Democrats look bad!
Oh, and Jack; Black Panther was only a boring comic book once Reginald Hudlin got a hold of it; the Christopher Priest run is a classic, and awesome.
Up against the wall, motherfucker!
If King Shabazz is lucky, he’ll end up like this in 10-15 years. Be sure to watch all the way until the children appear.
Someone’s trying to make this case into 2010′s version of the Death Panels. Nevermind that nightstick guy was convicted and given the maximum penalty — there’s an important cultural narrative at play here, and it needs to be supported whether the facts cooperate or not!
They hate us for our freedom.
Megyn Kelly over at FOX is up in arms about this, I tell you.
(and speaking of arms, is it a requirement of her employment that she be sleeveless at all times?)
[re=613129]V572625694[/re]: Not to be a pedantic history nerd about this, but yeah, the old version did. Remember, asshole conservative David Horowitz used to roll with them back in the day, though there’s some question about whether he might have already been an asshole conservative back then, also, given that most of his history with them centers around him accusing them of calling out a hit on this white lady who also used to roll with them.
The New Black Panthers are a Black Nationalist group, a movement which the old Black Panther Party sharply repudiated. The old Black Panthers were certainly a radical group, but styled themselves as a community self-defense group (think the New Left version of right-wing militias, only maybe with a slightly better reason for believing that their communities might maybe need defending by force, you know, given all the lynchings and beatings and firebombings) and took pains to distance themselves from Black Nationalism as itself a racist ideology. The division’s deep enough that surviving members of the old group have sued over use of the name. So, yes, different things, actually.
He eats GREY POUPON on his chee’burger people! I mean, who does that?
TELL me that’s not James O’Keeffe in militant drag. Also, do NONE of the kids these days get assigned “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”?
[re=613159]mumblyjoe[/re]:
Pedantic history is sexy; go ‘head chald.
[re=613167]One Yield Regular[/re]: Maybe they should dress up that little twat in his pimp costume and send him in to infiltrate the NBP. Make sure you film it, cracker!
King Shabazz has one exception: Wher da white women at?
[re=613138]mumblyjoe[/re]: okay, clearly I shouldnt’ make fun of Ken et al for not knowing how to close html tags any more.
Not that I won’t, but I shouldn’t.
I fear this guy like the Teabagger with the giant metal sign on the roof of his Buick and the Arby’s ad on the side of his car.
Fat, dumb and happy. Got a job where I sit in the car. In front of the building. All day in the sun. Do dee do dee do. Beezlebug got a devil in the car for meeeeee…Gallileo, Nintendo, or something like that.
Smoke another $.39 cent cigarette. Repeat.
OMG!!!11!! GLENN BECK WAS RIGHT!!!1!!!
[re=613180]freakishlystrong[/re]: Nice. We’ll call it “The New Journalism.”
First THE blacks infiltrated the ACORNS and destroyed that organization and now theyre hiding in the Black Panthers to hit my grandmoms in the head with a lead pipe at the polling booth.
Like that one rich stinky pig-eyed Florida recluse who was married by ELTON JOHNS says on my radio, “It’s all about payback.” That’s what all those black people think about, PAYBACK PAYBACK PAYBACK (that and they all hate America).
Okay, so I realize this dude doesn’t look very intimidating, and, yeah he’s a clown, and yeah his outfit is straight out of ‘I’m gonna get you sucka’, but here’s the thing: any sort of voter intimidation needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
I’m not sure what considerations led the DOJ to ‘drop the case’; perhaps they were worried about giving an ass-clown street cred to grow on.
Perhaps they realized that emaciated dude with a button-maker wasn’t really tied into a real black separatist movement.
Maybe they just want to tap his phone and see who calls him.
Also, I’m not sure that I trust the ‘drop the case’ characterization offered up by crazed foxnews capturing vidder dudes, but I do know that these guys were textbook intimidatin’, for real. Here’s the full video of that day, captured by a poll watcher from UPenn, who sounds actually sort of intimidated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neGbKHyGuHU.
They wanted to get arrested, which may be the reason that they aren’t being sentenced (they were prosecuted). Making this about Holder and his alleged blackness is dumb, which, is, of course the point of your whole post. But, sorry, I couldn’t let people think that these guys weren’t actually intimidating people on election day and deserved to be prosecuted.
[re=613232]HMS Nerd[/re]: Saw the full video. Thought they were security guards in drag at first. I guess one person’s intimidation is another person’s amusement.
(Though it is worth noting:
While the prosecutors dismissed charges against the organization, its leader and the third member, they won an order barring Shabazz from displaying a weapon within 100 feet of any open polling location in Philadelphia on any Election Day through 2012
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/20100703_Former_U_S__prosecutor_to_testify_on_New_Black_Panthers_charges.html
[re=613232]HMS Nerd[/re]: Certainly. And honestly, the rationale, “lack of complaints”, is problematic in the context of your more perniscious forms of voter intimidation, which certainly have a history in this country. On the other hand, though, it really is important to note exactly how selective the outrage is here, as what those Minutemen did in ’06 was considerably more egregious intimidation (meaning anyone saying this is “the worst they’ve ever seen” clearly has the long-term memory of a toddler), and actually did find complainants, including several Congresspeople, but, at the same time, for all the criticism we lodge at the Bush-era DoJ, it would nevertheless had been Deeply Unserious for us to accuse them of being racists for selectively enforcing the law in those cases, or even for hiring and firing attorneys based on their willingness to selectively enforce the law in this manner.
Fact is, in seeking a default judgement against the armed guy of this group, the Holder DoJ actually managed to do vastly more than the Gonzalez DoJ did about a largely equivalent, if not somewhat more egregious case of intimidation. The people who are expressing anger are experessing anger not out of genuine outrage, but because it’s not their team doing these things any more, and attributing it to racism, because the President and Attorney General are racial minorities. Plain and simple.
[re=613159]mumblyjoe[/re]: Interesting stuff, thanks. Facts are truly the enemy of snark.
So when King Shabazz said it did he misspell it like the right-tard video maker? “Kill some of thier babies”
[re=613159]mumblyjoe[/re]: What’s with the nuanced explanation, Osama bin mumblyjoe? We don’t do nuance in Christian ‘Merika!!1!
[re=613277]mumblyjoe[/re]:
“The people who are expressing anger are experessing anger not out of genuine outrage, but because it’s not their team doing these things any more, and attributing it to racism, because the President and Attorney General are racial minorities.”
Of course if we realized that we are all on the same team, we wouldn’t have this drama.
Jack, you should’ve told us the guy’s full name is Jigaboo Christian Adams. Changes the whole story when you know that.
[re=613167]One Yield Regular[/re]: My first thought — James O’Keefe. This is entirely Big Breitbart.
[re=613138]mumblyjoe[/re]: That’s not any kind of racism. When white nationalist militias do it, it’s founding father freedom protecting creator-given rights. When the old Black Panthers ran around with guns, that was a menace.
When the New Black Panther bunch of black nationalist bigots do it, well, all Black Panthers look alike so whatevs.
Plus, they are disturbers of the peace ’cause they don’t shutter the windows and walk in the gutter when the National Socialist Movement comes to town to take over the sidewalks.
The Black Panthers are nothing but a gang of punks. I know.
Those are the least intimidating “thugs” I’ve seen.
You know how you can tell these people are racists? I mean, how else you can tell? If the skin tone on the “thugs” were different, and everything else were the same, the people would be laughing or shrugging or taking a pamphlet politely. When, however, all you can see is color, when you can’t see a person at all, then you have just defined “racist,” or brain damage, and you have no place at the table of civilized persons.
[re=613277]mumblyjoe[/re]: Your demystification wins.
It remains, though, that it seems to be some really dreadful intimidation. I have long believed that the nationalists, separatists, etc. do not need to be fed with attention. When they’re comically stupid, they need to be ridiculed so that people get the impression, “Gee, I want to have a separate homeland for my race, but those guys are a joke, so I won’t join them.” Fortunately, the New Black Panthers here are not intimidating, and Holder would do well to marginalize them by keeping them off the news. Fox, of course, wants enemies. They would love to make Timothy McVeigh’s vision more realistic, as I think their actual joy is civil war.
More pernicious and effective voter intimidation has been practiced by the Republican Party several times. They have sent out confusing mailings to majority minority districts to confuse voters. In local races all over the country, both party sheriffs have used the tactic of selective arrests and magical voting day releases (“Well, I want you to be able to exercise your rights, you know, so I’ve talked to the judge, and you can go vote today”), and a hundred other dirty tricks. Compared to those things, a guy standing there with a stick is comedy.
[re=613494]Geogre[/re]: That’s actually why I’d be somewhat uncomfortable with using “lack of complaints” as a rationale for not persuing a case, actually. Those types of perniscious and effective voter intimidation often don’t see complaints, either because people aren’t sure they have a legit case, or because they’re genuinely afraid of legal or extralegal retaliation, or simply if they do say anything. Nobody complains about those “you can’t vote if you haven an outstanding warrant” letters, because they’re afraid that in so doing, they’ll be prosecuted, whether out of malice or of making themselves visible.
These so called black panthers are a joke.If that fool was in my way when i voted i would slap him to the ground and take his stick and put it up his ass.That black bitch would learn to keep his trash mouth shut.
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