From time to time, I watch Fox News during commercials, just to see what misinformation they are feeding to those sufficiently ignorant to trust them as an information source. I learned that it’s Obama’s fault that there is no immigration reform, and that it it Obama’s fault that the economy is in bad shape, on and on. But they went overboard on their latest voter intimidation scam.

As the right wing gears up for its regular, election-year fear-mongering over “voter fraud,” there are signals Fox News is setting up Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama to become this year’s ACORN for conservatives. The opening salvo in the latest “voter fraud” war came last week when Megyn Kelly interviewed a former DOJ attorney “whistle blower” who alleged that Holder has instituted a policy of not protecting whites’ voting rights or prosecuting African American violators. Not only did Kelly and Fox News buy into their source’s secondhand allegations about an insignificant case that showed no indications of representing a larger pattern – either of voter fraud or the DOJ’s policy – but Kelly trumpeted her interview as evidence that black thugs now have license to intimidate white voters in upcoming elections. It’s little more than an outsourced echo of Glenn Beck’s now-infamous accusation that Obama is a racist with a "deep-seated hatred for white people" but with an electoral, Department of Justice twist. The so-called whistle blower, J. Christian Adams, is a GOP activist who contends that the DOJ dropped its voter intimidation case against a few members of the New Black Panther Party, who behaved thuggishly at a polling place on Election Day 2008, because African American Holder – and by extension, Obama – has decided not to enforce whites’ voter rights. The DOJ has an entirely different point of view, one that was barely explored on “fair and balanced” Fox News, even though Kelly’s 1 PM show is supposed to be part of its “objective news” line up. The DOJ has said that the case against the Black Panthers was shaky and that this one incident didn’t constitute an orchestrated campaign or pattern to deny voting rights, the usual criteria for deploying federal resources in litigation. In fact, as Main Justice has reported, no voters at all in the Philadelphia precinct have come forward to allege intimidation. The complaints have come from white Republican poll watchers, who have given no evidence they were registered to vote in the majority black precinct. Nevertheless, Kelly deliberately led her viewers to think that Black Panthers would be showing up at voting precincts across the country… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <News Hounds>

Let me qualify this by saying that the New Black Panther Party (or any other group) ought not to be demonstrating outside of any polling pl ace There is already more than enough voter intimidation practiced by Republican “poll watchers” inside polling places. Nevertheless, it was an isolated incident, not a pattern, making it a subject better suited for local than federal action. In the absence of complaints from voters who were intimidated, there was no case to be made. What we have here is a simple example of the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda sowing fear and racism in their brainwashed viewers.