Having failed to convince us that President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, a secret Kenyan and a secret pal of terrorists, his opponents now want us to believe he is a secret pal of the New Black Panther Party.
Who? In case you're wondering, the New Black Panthers have no connection to the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s. Led by lawyer-activist Malik Zulu Shabazz, the New Black Panther Party has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League for promoting black supremacist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Although the party's membership could probably squeeze into a small SUV, it has received a huge amount of publicity from conservative blogs and talk shows. All the better to frighten you with, dear voter.
The right-wing blogosphere is outraged that the Justice Department under Obama's watch withdrew a federal civil rights suit charging the New Panthers with voter intimidation after two members stood outside a polling place in Philadelphia on Election Day in 2008.
A video of the two men, posted online, showed them dressed in paramilitary clothing. One, identified as King Samir Shabazz, carried a billy club.
But consider this: The polling place was in a majority-black precinct that has long voted Democratic. Most of the voters there hardly needed to be intimidated into voting for Obama.
Besides, when a police officer was summoned and told Shabazz to leave the area, he did. That might help to explain why then-Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham's office says it received no complaints of intimidation from the precinct.
Yet, shortly before the Bush administration left office in January 2009, the civil rights division filed a lawsuit alleging voter intimidation by the two men, plus their chairman and organization.
In April, the Panthers failed to show up in court, meaning the government appeared to win by default. But the next month the department dropped all charges, except the lawsuit against the club-wielding Shabazz. The government won an injunction that forbids him from carrying a weapon near a polling place in Philadelphia through 2012.
The right was livid. Republican lawmakers held up the confirmation of Obama's assistant attorney general for civil rights for months in a failed attempt to win a congressional review of the case.
But, despite accusations from bloggers and commentators, the case has not been ignored. An internal probe by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility is pending and the Commission on Civil Rights plans to issue a report in September.
The eight-member commission is dominated by six Bush-era appointees. After hearing hours of testimony, one prominent conservative member of the commission, Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, characterized the case as "small potatoes."
For one thing, she pointed out in a National Review essay, the case invokes a narrow provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act which has been prosecuted successfully only three times since its passage.
Indeed, Civil Rights Division chief Thomas Perez offered examples of much more substantial cases that the division declined to prosecute. For example, the department declined to prosecute a group of Minutemen, one of whom was armed with a gun, hanging around a polling place in Pima, Ariz., in 2006. Perhaps conservatives would have been less tough on Shabazz if he had been holding a gun instead of a club.
That may sound harsh, but so was a report from the Government Accountability Office last December that found a significant drop in the enforcement of several major anti-discrimination and voting rights laws during the Bush presidency, as compared with the Clinton administration. Now the shoe is on the other foot.
As Thernstrom wrote in her essay, there are so many other, more substantial criticisms to make of the Obama administration, "Why waste your breath on this one?" Why? Well, there's always politics.
"In 2010, Republicans across the nation should make King Samir Shabazz their 21st century Willie Horton," conservative CNN commentator Erick Erickson wrote on his "Red State" Web site. That's already happening, Erick.
During the 1988 presidential race, Horton, a black murderer and rapist, was used to smear Democrat Michael Dukakis as being soft on crime. Now the New Black Panthers are being used to vilify a black president as being soft on black racism. Coming soon, I am sure, to campaign attack ads near you.
Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage
cpage@tribune.com
