With a nod to WPGB’s Jim Quinn, I want to call to your attention, this monring to an article that appeared in National Review, yesterday, by Hans A. von Spakovsky, called “A Leadership of Cowards?” [1]
Here’s a bit of it:
Attorney General Eric Holder calls the U.S. “a nation of cowards” because we “do not talk enough about race.” I find this ironic, since the Justice Department seems embarrassed about a recent judgment in its favor by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. U.S. v. Ike Brown [2]is a major Voting Rights Act case involving intentional race-based discrimination by local officials in Noxubee County, Miss.
When the Fifth Circuit issued its decision on February 27, there was complete silence from Justice. The department typically issues a press release after any significant litigation victory, and the Civil Rights Division trumpets every success. But not here. The silence from the nation’s leading news outlets was also deafening: Not a word was published about the case by the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any other major publication. Why? Because the offensive conduct at issue did not conveniently track with the Left’s view of race discrimination.
The Noxubee County case presents a deeply disturbing account of some of the most egregious racial discrimination the Justice Department has encountered in decades. In Noxubee, 80 percent of Democrats are black; 20 percent are white. (There are some Republicans as well, but the number is negligible.) The chairman of the Democratic party, Ike Brown, is black, and he, along with the Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee, set about to effectively disenfranchise white voters.
The court decision shows that Brown had his own local version of Tammany Hall, and local election officials followed his orders. This included publishing in the local newspaper a list of 174 white Democratic voters whose eligibility he intended to challenge if they tried to vote in an upcoming election. According to the court, Brown compiled the list based on the individuals’ perceived lack of support for black candidates. One voter testified that she was so intimidated she didn’t vote. Another testified that she was so scared she felt she couldn’t approach the polls alone.
The court also found that Brown took measures to ensure that absentee ballots from black voters were automatically counted even if they didn’t comply with Mississippi law, while absentee ballots from white voters with the same deficiencies were challenged and not counted. He even reviewed many absentee ballots the night before an election, placing notes on them saying which should be counted and which should be rejected.
One victim, whose absentee ballot was basically stolen by the defendants and whose signature on the application and ballot envelope were obviously forged, was brought in a second time to testify after she was confronted by a member of the local Democratic party following her initial testimony. The witness was told that “we black people need to stick together” and was urged to testify that she “probably didn’t understand what [she was] being asked” during the first go-around.
The court also found that Brown recruited black individuals to run for office against white incumbents despite knowing that they didn’t meet residency requirements; refused to appoint whites as poll workers; and sent out Democratic party members to give unrequested “assistance” to black voters, marking their ballots for them and telling them how to vote. All of this was intended to dilute the voting strength of white voters and to achieve his goal, which he openly expressed — “that all of the county’s elected officials should be black.”
There’s a whole lot more, and I’ll advise you go and read the whole thing. This is the kind of story that an Obama administration can’t let see the light of day, and so it will NOT see it. It runs afoul of the narrative that Obama and his people need to continue their control.
This is the kind of thing we’re up against, and is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about when I told Bruce McQuain last night [3], on the topic of AIG and the bonuses they paid their employees:
—this thing is going to be fought out in the court of public opinion. If you think the court of public opinion is driven largely by facts, explain to me how it is that Obama is currently residing in the White House—
The ‘Global Warming’ narrative is the same way. Any facts that run contrary to the narrative will be ignored.We’ve discussed that here many times. That’s the kind of people that are currently in power, folks. This is how they roll.
Forget fact. It’s the image, the narrative above all. I’ve been telling you for years, now that Obama supporters back him on pure emotion, not fact, and on that basis they never can be defeated by mere fact. This Brown thing is another datapoint in the list of examples of how that works. I see the same thing in motion in the AIG thing. the pattern here is most revealing, people.. and I’ll tell you… This story being out in National Review, and Jim’s comments and mine not withstanding, nobody’s going to hear about it, in the end. Not really. There’s been no Dianosaur coverage on the matter. None. See for yourself. [4] What you’ll see is a lot of legal sites, along with the DOJ’s reference. Just for giggles, try hitting the news tab. You’ll be interested by what you don’t find.
The narrative of racism being only a white on black issue will have been upheld, regardless of the facts in the case, and the political aims of people like Ike Brown will have been aided, upheld and reinforced. They will never face the facts, because they don’t need to. They control the narrative, already. And that is their path to continuing power.
The activists masqurading as layers in the Civil Rights division know it, too.
This is probably one of the worst cases of intentional voting discrimination that the Justice Department has prosecuted since the 1960s. But the lawsuit was filed only after a vicious internal fight in the Civil Rights Division. Left-wing career lawyers in the Voting Section made it abundantly clear that they didn’t want to use the Voting Rights Act to protect white voters, no matter how egregious the violations. The former Voting Section chief even deleted the recommendation to file suit from the memo sent up to the Bush political appointees running the division. Other partisan career lawyers refused to work on the case. One who went to Noxubee County as an observer admitted to another lawyer that if he had seen the same type of illegal behavior being committed against black voters, he would have been outraged. But he wanted nothing to do with a suit filed on behalf of white voters.
Are you getting the message yet, America?