That’s the big quote from the non-Colbert news of the day, as former Justice Dept. Voting Section Chief Christopher Coates testified about that pesky business with the New Black Panthers. You know, that minor incident where they brandished weapons and intimidated people in front of a polling station in Philadelphia on Election Day ’08 and got away with it. You can read the full text of Coates’ testimony here, and Ed Morrissey points to one of the highlights:
It contains at least one bombshell, which is that Obama appointee Loretta King ordered Coates to stop asking applicants whether they supported race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The question became necessary because of resistance in the Civil Rights division from career attorneys to enforce the law when it resulted in African-American defendants rather than victims, an attitude that Coates first encountered in the Bush era:
Opposition within the Voting Section was widespread to taking actions under the VRA on behalf of white voters in Noxubee County, MS, the jurisdiction in which Ike Brown was and is the Chairman of the local Democratic Executive Committee. In 2003, white voters and candidates complained to the Voting Section that elections had been administered in a racially discriminatory manner and asked that federal observers be sent to the primary run-off elections. Career attorneys in the Voting Section recommended that we not even go to Noxubee County for the primary run-off to do election coverage, but that opposition to going to Noxubee was overridden by the Bush Administration’s CRD Front Office. I went on the coverage and while traveling to Mississippi, the Deputy Chief who was leading that election coverage asked me, “can you believe that we are going to Mississippi to protect white voters?” What I observed on that election coverage was some of the most outrageous and blatant racially discriminatory behavior at the polls committed by Ike Brown and his allies that I have seen or had reported to me in my thirty-three plus years as a voting rights litigator.
Were you under the impression that people have civil rights even if they’re white? Silly wingnut.
P.S. Ace of Spades is correct:
Here is the sum and entirety of the leftist defense of this. You’ll see this in the coming days quite a bit:
Oh Noes! Poor whites are now under a New Jim Crow system! Oh Noes!
So much stupidity and malice is packed into that predictable sarcastic rejoinder. The most important idea expressed: So long as racial discrimination directed against whites does not rise to the level of full, 1955 Jim Crow, no harm, no foul, nothing to complain about, and whites’ (and good-spirited minorities’, too) objections to such a shabby system of discrimination should just shut their mouths and accept that a little bit of second-class-citizenship is nothing to go crazy about.