Continuing the ongoing media farce that is Fox’s coverage of the new Black Panther case, Oliver Willis points to a segment in which poll watcher Bartle Bull, the poll watcher who was present at the polling station in Philadelphia when the incident occurred, ties the NBPP case to ACORN:
BULL: We’re making judgments. We don’t know it, but the fact is that they want to maximize their vote. This is basically ACORN vote that they want to.
O’REILLY: This gets tied into ACORN?
BULL: I didn’t say that. I said they wanted to do is to maximize the ACORN vote. And you do that by not challenging this sort of procedure, because these are the same people who are registering voters. Also, “The New York Times”, for example, said hundreds of thousands, one-third of all ACORN board voters were fraudulent last time.
Huh. I wonder what Bull means by “the ACORN Vote?”
Bull is displaying the typical conservative inability to tell the difference between voter fraud, in which someone casts a fradulent vote, and voter registration fraud, in which someone fills out incorrect information on a voter registration form. ACORN overestimated the number of voters it had actually registered by including about 400,000 forms that were rejected by election officials. Since these forms had been rejected, it would be hard for the people who filled them out to show up and cast fraudulent votes, much less be protected by a black separatist group as part of a larger conspiracy to steal the election.
Bull is one of a number of characters in the New Black Panther saga whose credibility relies in conservatives’ ability to portray him as a neutral observer. For example, conservatives like to identify Bull as a “Democrat” omitting that he was a poll watcher for the McCain campaign. They identify former voting rights attorney and conservative blogger J. Christian Adams as a “whistleblower,” and neglect to mention that he was hired at a time when political appointees at the Justice Department were only hiring attorneys with conservative backgrounds. Former Voting Rights Section Chief Christopher Coates is identified simply as a career attorney, and not part of Bradley Shlozman‘s politicized conservative “team” in the Civil Rights Division. They cast the Republican appointee dominated U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as an apolitical bi-partisan body, ignoring that the investigation of the NBPP case is proceeding despite the protests of the non-conservative appointees and that of one Republican appointee, Abigail Thernstrom.
The NBPP case is unique because there’s ideological symmetry between the conservative media and the people dominating the government body with some oversight power over the Justice Department–there would be no story without the legitimacy lent by the ostensibly apolitical but operationally partisan USCCR. But the conservative effort to hide just how partisan the cast of characters are implies how unsubstantiated the allegations of racial bias on the part of the Justice Department actually are.
