And justice for all ... of the right skin color

From National Review, on the Obama Administration's railroading of the Department of Justice lawyer who wanted to prosecute the thugs who intimidated elderly white voters at the polls in Philadelphia during the November 2008 elections:

It’s not news that Christopher Coates, the former chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, was relieved of his post on January 5 and “transferred” to South Carolina for an 18-month assignment with the U.S. attorney’s office. (See my article on the NRO home page.)

Coates had been relentlessly criticized by liberals both inside and outside the division because of his involvement in two cases — one in Noxubee County, Mississippi (U.S. v. Ike Brown et al.), the other in Philadelphia (U.S. v. New Black Panther Party et al.) — that feature clear-cut voting-rights violations (namely, discrimination and intimidation) committed by black defendants.

Coates is a former ACLU attorney who has received many awards for his work in the area of civil rights over the past four decades. He has filed numerous voting-rights cases on behalf of minority voters. But he got in trouble because some of the ideologues who inhabit the civil-rights community don’t want to accept anyone who doesn’t share their view of Voting Rights Act (VRA) enforcement. One of their unbreakable rules is that the VRA shouldn’t be used to protect white voters from discrimination committed by racial or ethnic minorities.

Apparently eager to punish Coates for his role in these cases, political appointees in the Obama administration effectively stripped him of all his management and supervisory authority soon after they came into power. The indignity and abuse to which Coates was subjected represents a disheartening example of the politicization of Eric Holder’s Justice Department, and will serve as another ugly stain on an out-of-control Civil Rights Division.

In any event, Coates had a going-away event on January 4 that was attended by the entire staff of the Voting Section and several members of the Civil Rights Division’s new political leadership, including the assistant attorney general. Several people who were there (including a former colleague who no longer works at the Justice Department but was an invited guest) told me what Coates said.

His speech is a remarkable statement by a respected career lawyer. It’s one that every Justice Department employee should hear, particularly at a time when politics seems to be driving so many law-enforcement decisions at the Justice Department. ...

Read the rest here, as well as the referenced article above (or go here) for more information on Mr. Coates and the Obamites sidetracking of the Voting Rights Act lawsuits. Hmmm, so Mr. Coates, who started his career at the Justice Department during the Clinton administration, is a former ACLU attorney with four decades of experience who has received awards from such groups as the NAACP for his civil rights, and specifically voting rights, advocacy. To the Obamites, he's clearly a right-wing racist hater, no?

At any rate, to recap our new voting rights enforcement policy in the era of Hope and Change: it's OK to stand around the entrances of polling stations dressed in all-black military style garb and brandish nightsticks at elderly folks to intimidate, er, "persuade" them, er, inform them of their voting options to assist them in exercising their voting rights in an informed and educated manner. But only if you're black (or possibly just very well tanned), and the elderly folks are white, or as the illuminati call them, persons of pallor. Got it?