My article from today’s FrontPage magazine:
The Arrogance of Eric Holder
By Matthew Vadum
Attorney General Eric Holder argues in a new interview that activism is the proper role of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer — and it is precisely this radical conceit that by itself ought to disqualify him from holding the office.
“If you want to call me an activist attorney general, I will proudly accept that label,” he told left-wing journalist Juan Williams.
“Any attorney general who is not an activist is not doing his or her job,” Holder pontificated, skating over the long-recognized fact that an attorney general is supposed to enforce the law, not fundamentally transform the nation. (For a full profile of Holder, see DiscoverTheNetworks.)
“The responsibility of the attorney general is to change things [and] bring us closer to the ideals expressed in our founding documents,” he said, again deliberately misrepresenting the purpose of his high office.
It is especially galling that Holder invokes the nation’s founding documents, which to him are mere pieces of parchment to be ignored or overcome depending on the political exigencies of the moment.
When critics decry his Department of Justice for containing an “activist civil rights division and this is an activist attorney general — I’d say I agree with you 1,000 percent and [I am] proud of it,” Holder said.
This is not mere hubris.
Holder is the legal ringleader for today’s Democrats and their culture of corruption. After being held in criminal contempt of Congress in June 2012 –the first such citation against a sitting attorney general in American history– he is just a few steps away from being impeached in the House of Representatives and tried in the Senate for the high crimes and misdemeanors his detractors say he has committed against the American people.
Twenty House members have introduced a formal impeachment resolution, H.Res. 411. The resolution’s four articles of impeachment accuse Holder of wrongdoing in connection with his involvement in the Fast and Furious scandal, refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, refusing to prosecute IRS officials who leaked confidential GOP donor tax information, and providing misleading testimony to Congress about whether he approved invasive investigative tactics against reporters like James Rosen of Fox News.
First and foremost, Holder is a whiner. When in trouble, he cowers under a tarpaulin-sized race card. It is all so tedious.
He bristled when lawmakers dared to question him in various congressional hearings. When he got into hot water for withholding documents on the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal, his arrogance burned brightly.
“What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?” he asked disingenuously.
Holder hates conservatives with a passion.
He calls conservatives “defenders of the status quo, afraid of the future, and content to allow to continue to exist all but the most blatant inequalities.” They “put the environment at risk for the sake of unproven economic theories, to play to the fears of our citizens, and not to their hopes, and to return the nation to a time that in fact never existed.” The hallmarks of the “conservative agenda” include “social division, mindless tax cutting, and a defense posture that does not really make us safer.”
Clearly, this, coming from a member of the most divisive administration in memory, is a case of psychological projection.
Moreover, Holder surrounds himself with unsavory people.
His former top civil rights enforcer, Thomas Perez, is a former top aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and possibly a perjurer. At DoJ, Perez, a former president of illegal alien support group Casa de Maryland, led the Obama administration’s assault on voter ID laws. Before heading off to become Obama’s Secretary of Labor, Perez played a major role in enacting the Church Arson Prevention Act, legislation based on the false premise that black churches were being targeted with disproportionate frequency by arsonists. He targeted Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio for legal harassment because he didn’t like Arpaio’s tough-on-crime approach, especially with respect to illegal aliens.
Perez, like so many Obama administration officials, believes that America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant rubes who irrationally fear the Muslim religion. He has worked with hardcore Islamist groups such as the terrorist-linked Islamic Society of North America and applauded Islamists for lobbying against airline security measures.
Holder backed President Obama’s nominee to replace Perez, Debo Adegbile, a race-obsessed lawyer who tried to permanently free unrepentant cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. A former head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Adegbile is a staunch affirmative action supporter who doesn’t appear to believe that white Americans are entitled to civil rights protection. In a rare victory for common sense, the Senate rejected Adegbile’s nomination.
If there is any justice, after the Obama era mercifully draws to a close, Holder will be prosecuted for a litany of abuses that have been ably documented by J. Christian Adams in Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department and by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky in Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for justice to be done.
Like President Barack Hussein Obama, Holder knows he is largely inoculated from criticism because he is black. Holder possesses an ugly combination of creepy self-righteousness, cockiness, hatred of country, and racist contempt for white Americans that makes him the darling of the activist Left and the mainstream media which refuses to report on his many, many misdeeds.
Holder is an invaluable member of the Obama cabinet because he knows where the bodies are buried. Chances are he buried the bodies. He is not We The People’s lawyer but instead serves as a personal consigliere, or mob lawyer, to the highest elected gangster in the land, President Obama. And he will never cross the capo di tutti capi. He will bend and twist any statute into pretzels, torture any legal precedent into docility, and intimidate and persecute anyone who gets in his way.
Like all the other identity politics-focused neo-Marxists in the Obama administration, Holder is obsessed with race.
This psychopathology presents itself prominently more or less every time Holder makes a speech.
Instead of thinking of himself as an unhyphenated American, Holder speaks of “my people,” when referring to blacks. And although Americans talk about race constantly and often to the point of nausea, Holder thinks more needs to be said. Because most Americans don’t share his race-based resentments and sense of racial entitlement, they are bad people in this view. This helps in part to explain his infamous claim that America is “a nation of cowards” on race.
America remains a deeply racist nation, just as systemically biased against blacks as it was in the Jim Crow era, as Holder sees it. Government-mandated racism such as affirmative action programs and other special treatment for minorities is desperately needed, in his view.
Holder loathes Chief Justice John Roberts’s eminently sensible formulation that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Like the racial hucksters of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Holder acts like a Klansmen is hiding under every bed, ready to terrorize the nation’s blacks.
“There are still [racial] issues we as a society are working our way through,” Holder said. “And the lack of desire to do that, I think, undermines the ability that I think is inherent in the American people to make progress. But it also does not prepare us for demographic changes, the likes of which this country has never seen.”
Some of those projected demographic changes are largely nonexistent, of course, accomplished by rejiggering definitions of various races, for example, of Hispanics, a group whose membership ebbs and flows depending on which party controls the Census Bureau.
“The justice system is part of the larger society and to the extent there are racial issues we are still grappling with, it is not a shock that you are going to see them in the justice system … [There is] a whole range of ways the justice system, if it is run properly, can make this country the country it wants to be.”
How Holder knows what the country “wants to be” is unclear. What is clear is that he is willing to foment racial tension and hatred that get people killed in order to change society. Under Holder, the Department of Justice sent taxpayer-paid community agitators down to Sanford, Florida, to whip up hysteria against the so-called white Hispanic, George Zimmerman, since-acquitted of the murder of black juvenile delinquent Trayvon Martin.
Holder’s idea of justice consists of letting thugs go free — provided that they have the right skin color. He has steadfastly refused to prosecute hate crimes committed against white Americans. He presided over the DoJ’s dismissal of an otherwise open-and-shut case involving two members of the New Black Panther Party who intimidated white voters in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008.
Interviewer Juan Williams writes that “Holder remains indifferent to conservative protests that he is an ‘activist’ looking for trouble by digging into what he calls ‘policies [with] disproportionate impact on communities of color.’”
Disparate racial outcomes “are not only shameful and unacceptable – they impede our ability to see that justice is done,” according to Holder. “And they perpetuate cycles of poverty, crime and incarceration that trap individuals, destroy communities and decimate minority neighborhoods.”
Setting aside the seductive sociobabble, it needs to be stated that decades of social studies show pretty conclusively that blacks violate these so-called policies with disparate impact, also known as “the law,” more than whites and other groups do and grossly out of proportion to their numbers. By Holder’s reasoning, laws against honor killings have a disparate impact on Muslims — even though Muslims commit most honor killings in Western civilization. The only reasoning progressives like Holder understand is circular logic.
Again, as America’s first black U.S. attorney general, Holder knows that whatever he does in office, he is likely never going to be held to account. His misdeeds will not see the light of day because the Obama-worshipping media and opposition party lawmakers are either sympathetic to Obama’s agenda or are too afraid to confront the president and Holder out of fear of being tarred as racist.
“The havoc Holder has created goes far beyond corruption on any single issue,” according to J. Christian Adams.
“The damage he has done crosses all components of the Department of Justice, and has trickled down to infect the systems of law and legal jurisprudence throughout the country. He has tried to transform the federal agency intended to be above politics into an institution advocating radical change and extreme remedies.”
And Eric Holder doesn’t give a damn who gets hurt in the process.