Man, the Stephen Colbert thing must have been an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats: it actually shoved the Christopher Coates testimony on the New Black Panther Party situation onto the front page of the Washington Post. And not in an uniformly favorable way to the Department of Justice.

To do a quick review: back in 2008 a couple of Black Panthers engaged in a little voter intimidation in Philadelphia on Election Day. The Department of Justice went after that, it being against the law and everything… and then got told by the new administration in 2009 that only white people were going to be acceptable defendants of civil rights violations investigations done by the DoJ. We will now pause while the Left pretends that they are outraged, shocked, and indignant at the above. Well, they might be outraged: being a yellow-jacket doesn’t mean that you personally enjoy getting stung yourself. Quite the opposite, really.

Moving along, there’s been a steadily-growing controversy over the whole situation, and Coates’s testimony yesterday was a bombshell. Coates – who, as the WaPo itself notes, is a Clinton appointee with ties to the ACLU – essentially said everything that I did in the last paragraph, only much more formally, and with names liberally named. Which is why the front page, and not, say, the ombudsman’s; Christopher Coates is not an easy figure to dismiss. Although I expect that there’s a staffer over at MMfA, OfA, or the DNC with a new weekend project.

But as character assassination is always a shot in the dark, it’s prudent for the administration to be proactive and attempt to change the subject. Their defense? What do you think? “Blame Bush,” of course: we don’t really have what you’d call an imaginative executive branch of government these days. They’re trying the ‘DoJ is always been political’ gambit:

The watchdogs concluded, for example, that the division’s former head refused to hire lawyers who he labeled “commies.”

Leaving aside that the fellow almost certainly thought of that epithet as ‘Commies’ – the capital is important – it’s funny: if the guy had said “Nazis” nobody would have blinked an eye. Justifiably, of course: fascists may not have murdered as many people as communists did in the last century, but they certainly tried to, so it’s not unreasonable at all to despise them, too. But if this administration thinks that complaining about the last administration’s apparent institutional intolerance for Commies is somehow going to make everything all better for them in the NBPP case, well, speaking as a partisan Republican I welcome that attitude.

Moe Lane (Crosspost)