"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” President Abraham Lincoln
July 17, 2013
By: Linda Case Gibbons
So it just might be that Attorney General Holder thought the Sanford, Florida court was playing Rock, Paper, Scissors in the George Zimmerman trial. Maybe that’s why he thinks he can have a "do over” of the "not guilty” verdict.
Holder wants to "get” Zimmerman. He says he also wants to overturn all Stand Your Ground state laws in 30 states as an unacceptable expansion of the right to self-defense. The defense in the Zimmerman case never used Stand Your Ground as a defense, but that doesn’t matter to Holder.
Details don’t matter. Facts don’t matter.
Holder didn’t like the verdict. Obama didn’t. No one on the left did. They want what they want, so Holder did what he and this administration has done in the past: Disregard the law, spy on private citizens and use race whenever possible.
Mere days after the verdict, Holder and assistant AG Thomas Perez got on the horn and had a conference call on Monday with civil rights groups, community leaders nationally and in Sanford, the FBI, some prosecutors, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the ACLU.
Holder’s message to the group: Dig up facts about Zimmerman and report back to us so that the DOJ can build a federal criminal civil rights case against him. Then Holder promptly set up a public e-mail address to take tips from his "posse.”
Now that is impressive.
Holder and the DOJ never moved that quickly when questioned about Fast and Furious, or Benghazi, or the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservatives or the surveillance of Associated Press reporters or with the National Security Agency scandal.
But when it mattered to him, acting as an agent on behalf of the now silent Barack Obama, Holder put the full power of his office against a U.S. citizen.
The plan is to divide America and stack up more votes. Obama made it clear when he commented on the Zimmerman case last year what he wanted the outcome to be. And he didn’t get it.
The administration, through Holder’s agency, is going to persecute George Zimmerman as it did FOX reporter James Rosen and Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio to get what they want.
Did Holder read the report from his own people at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, because it clearly stated the FBI could find no evidence of racism with respect to George Zimmerman.
But facts do not matter to Holder.
The DOJ persecuted Arizona’s Sheriff Arpaio for three years, investigating, monitoring and ultimately suing Arpaio for racially profiling Latinos.
Even though Arpaio was given a clean bill of health by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in 2008, Perez sued him anyway.
Perez passed on the Black Panther voter intimidation case, but he sued Arpaio. Heaven knows what he’ll do as Secretary of Labor.
The administration’s approach is to use race. They do it all the time
At the NAACP National Conference in Orlando this month Holder promised his department would move against Zimmerman. He felt their pain, and said he, too, was worried.
Worried about what? That six jurors did exactly what our Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution? That the jurors didn’t cave to pressure from groups threatening to riot at a not guilty verdict even though Obama’s media said they would? That six women jurors proved to be competent citizens performing their civic duty even though Obama’s media said they wouldn’t?
That’s a success story for America, not something to worry about. But not to Eric Holder.
In his keynote speech there Holder said he was "profiled” and stopped by a policeman while driving when he was younger and later in Washington when he was a federal prosecutor. He had to tell his son this story, he said, as his dad had to tell him, to teach him how to interact with the police.
There probably wasn’t a dry eye in the house at this example of Eric Holder’s suffering through the dangers of living in a racist America and rising to become attorney general.
In his 2009 speech to Justice Department employees commemorating Black History Month Holder called Americans a "nation of cowards” about race.
And at the 2012 Conference of National Black Churches he warned against current states’ efforts to enforce voter I.D. laws, implying this racist America was returning to its pre-Civil Rights days and was seeking to suppress black voters.
Lt. Col. Allen West and Dr. Ben Carson have a far different view of Holder’s America. As successful, grateful Americans, they praise an America where they could choose to educate themselves, work hard and fight for their American dream.
But that isn’t what the Obama Doctrine is about. The formula is to denigrate America, attack the opposition, distract from real issues and promise anything to the flavor of the month group, but do nothing.
Holder is courting the black vote now by attacking the Zimmerman verdict because Obama’s now ardent support of gay rights and gay marriage is vehemently opposed by black religious leaders and that could mean lost votes in 2014.
Elections are always ahead and as Obama has shown, you should never stop campaigning. Fanning racial tensions works. Dividing people and pitting them against each other works. It serves to turn attention from all of Obama’s failures and scandals.
Sadly none of the black leaders ever asked Holder why he is not applauding our justice system in the Zimmerman case, or why he is not investigating Mayor Rahm Emanuel for the murders of black Americans in Chicago, 20 homicides for the first week of July, or why the unemployment rate for black Americans is at 23.7 percent. And most importantly, why these problems have not been tops on the president’s priority list of "must does” for the past five years.
They never asked this administration why a 19-year-old high school graduate with a 3.0 grade point average cannot read a document handwritten in cursive writing, or why she does not have a command of the English language and why she spews racial epithets and does not think they are racist.
They never asked why Obama and Holder only come to the black community when they want something. Why they invoke the Civil Rights Movement and the names Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. only when they want something.
Because it is apparent that otherwise this administration just doesn’t bother with black America’s problems. Black Americans are just another block of votes to be courted, just like illegal immigrants, just like the labor unions, just like the environmentalists.
In this case the Zimmerman trial provided a handy tool to gather votes from the black community.
As the trial unfolded and in the time leading up to it, it was apparent that liberals probably thought "Zimmerman” was a white man, maybe even a Jewish white man at the time of the shooting.
It was the reason Al Sharpton gathered his troops in Sanford, but by then it was too late for Sharpton and the Black Panthers and the liberal media to back away when, to their dismay, they discovered Zimmerman, too, was a minority.
So this time around, instead of trashing America one more time, maybe Eric Holder ought to focus his attention as attorney general on the papers on his desk, the Benghazi papers, IRS, AP, Fast and Furious all the ones he never read.
Or maybe, as attorney general, he could comment on the prosecutorial misconduct in the Zimmerman case, the prosecution’s unethically omitting evidence and then firing the "whistleblower” who disclosed there was evidence.
Or the political bias of the presiding judge.
But I don’t think any of this will happen. That would probably be racist.
Hold the line, America.