url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/surprise-the-rights-new-black-panther-obsession-turns-out-to-be-a-joke/2011/03/04/AFsvnp2B_blog.html]
New Black Panthers story a Joke[/url]
Yesterday, the Justice Department released the long-awaited results of its inquiry into its own handling of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, and the verdict is in: This whole tale has been complete nonsense from the very beginning. The right has been obsessing over this case for years, insisting that Justice’s decision to dismiss the case against three of four defendents accused of voter intimidation at a Philadelphia polling station in 2008 proves that the Obama administration is riddled with anti-white racists.
It should come as a shock to no one that the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility has “found no evidence that the decision to dismiss the case against three of the four defendants was predicated on political considerations” or that there was “improper political interference or influence from within or outside the Department in connection with the decision in the case.” As Ryan J. Reilly reports, this comes after OPR interviewed numerous staffers and sifted through “thousands of pages of internal Department e-mails, memoranda, and notes.”
To sum up: The New Black Panther tale — a years-long journey into the fevered right-wing imagination that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and led to no shortage of scurrilous accusations of racism against the first black president and attorney general — was a colossal waste of time and taxpayer resources.
