It can’t all be about race, can it? Even though House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa stands over his seated African-American Co-Chair and speaks to him like a house slave. It was mortifying to watch.
That Co-Chair, Maryland Rep- Elijah Cummings, had demanded the opportunity to speak at a hearing Issa had adjourned over his objections. If you think I’m over-reacting, watch it for yourself.
Monday, America’s Mayor abdicated his title, if he hadn’t already, as he described totalitarian Vladimir Putin as decisive, and “a leader” — as opposed to a dictator which is pretty much what he is. The drumbeat went on: John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Sarah Palin and the rest of them. But here’s Giuliani:
Then today. Here’s how the New York Times tells the story of the Debo Adegbile:
Debo Adegbile did his job, and for that he was deemed unfit by the Senate to become the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. His misstep, specifically, was helping represent a death-row inmate while he was director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
With this excuse in hand, Senate Republicans and seven cowardly Democrats, three of whom are up for re-election in November, managed to shut down Mr. Adegbile’s nomination. The final, shameful vote was effectively 51-48 (Senator Harry Reid supported Mr. Adegbile but voted no for procedural reasons).
But wait: didn’t the Senate vote to confirm John Roberts to the Supreme Court, even after learning that he, too, had assisted in the defense of a death-row inmate? That man, John Errol Ferguson, killed eight people. (Despite the help of one of the nation’s top lawyers, Ferguson was executed in Florida last year.)
So why does John Roberts get a pass but not Debo Adegbile? Because Mr. Adegbile represented Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for killing a Philadelphia police officer named Daniel Faulkner. For three decades the case has reverberated across the region, which now apparently includes the constituency of Delaware Senator Chris Coons, the last and least expected Democratic vote against the nomination.
Even those who felt ambivalent about the Mumia case, one would hope, would want the accused to have a constitutionally-guaranteed defense, right? And no one questioned Mr. Adegbile’s capacity or experience, so he should have been fine. But no. A vicious FOX campaign planted the seed and it worked, even pulling in a few Democrats. They knew they were succumbing to demagoguery; they had to.
So at a time when voting rights are under challenge across the country without a full Voting Rights Act to protect them, at a time when a public figure can call the President of the United States a “subhuman mongrel,” and just keep going, when swing state early and weekend voting hours most used by timecard workers and students are eviscerated, when our first African-American President faces fierce obstruction for anything he proposes, we pretend we are behaving like the citizens we were meant to be. And aren’t.
Bad things happen all the time these days – but these three in such rapid succession were a real kick in the gut.
