Panther Justice

Baby panther, via.

Did anybody call Andrea Tantaros out to clarify what she meant?

"He didn't enforce the laws on Obamacare," Tantaros said. "He was droning terrorists without a trial while he was giving them trials in downtown Manhattan. He ran the DOJ much like the Black Panthers would. That is a fact."

It is? I mean, how would the Black Panthers run the Justice Department?

Which Panthers, in the first place? Huey? Eldridge? Eldridge, of course, ended up politically a lot more like John Ashcroft, who ran the DOJ, um, better than Alberto Gonzales, for what that's worth. Yes, that's setting the bar so low you couldn't do the Limbo under it with more than two dimensions.

Jet magazine, February 24 1986.

Huey I don't want to joke about, seriously. Anyway his experience was as Minister of Defense; the Minister of Justice in the Black Panther Party was the former H. Rap Brown, now Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, and serving a life sentence for murder in a supermax prison in Colorado. He was the one who said that violence is as American as cherry pie. Has Eric Holder ever suggested that he believes violence is as American as cherry pie, or any variety of pie? I thought not.

I can only find two actual activities that Brown/Jamil carried out as Minister of Justice during his brief term in 1968, both less than Holder-like:

he wrote his first book, Die Nigger Die, in which he claimed that white people wanted all blacks dead. Then, rather than face criminal charges stemming from the Cambridge incident of 1967, Brown jumped bail and disappeared for two years, thereby earning himself a spot on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. 

I am pretty sure the attorney general has never used the N-word in public, certainly not as part of a book title, and if he had ever jumped bail the Senate would likely have declined to confirm him.

Let us turn with relief to Huey's co-founder of the party, Bobby Seale, who never held a ministerial position, but has a good deal of organizational experience running nonprofit enterprises including very substantial children's breakfast programs (no snark intended, they filled the Fillmore in San Francisco), and very nearly becoming mayor of Oakland in 1973, and publishing a cookbook beginning with a declaration of rights:

As the commercialized backwards "bottle-back" recipe methods pursue and invariably evince a design to reduce our backyard-picnics into burnt, half done, bland, badly seasoned, improperly pit-qued entrees, then it is the right of we the barbeque lovers of the world, to alter the cue-be-rab phenomenon and creatively change our recipe process for a more righteous saucy, down-home, wood-smoking, delectable, baste-marinating, barbeque'n methodology.

I really like the thought of Bobby Seale as attorney general, but we'll never know if it could have worked out or what in fact it would have been like.

The co-founder of the Illinois Panthers was, of course, the only politician ever to defeat Barack Obama in an election, Representative Bobby Rush. Last year, when Senator Mark Kirk apparently suggested that the federal government should spend $30 million on seizing 18,000 young black Chicago men and dumping them in detention without trial—

"My top priority is to arrest the Gangster Disciple gang, which is 18,000 people," Kirk said. "I would like to a mass pickup of them and put them all in the Thomson Correctional Facility, I will be proposing this to the assembled federal law enforcement: ATF, DEA and FBI"

—Rush advised that this might not be a good idea:

Rush, asked by the Sun-Times to react to Kirk’s proposal said in a phone interview: “It’s a sensational, headline-grabbing, empty, simplistic, unworkable approach.” If there is $30 million for Congress to spend, better most of it be allocated for “job creation and job training,” to address the gang problem, Rush said.

Showing a good understanding of Senator Kirk and the practicalities of the project both. He didn't, however, evoke the Constitution, as we might want the attorney general to do, and as Holder did when he announced in 2009 that he'd like to make a break with the mass arrests and detentions of Muslim Americans that marked his predecessors' administration:

"The President's pledge for a new beginning between the United States and the Muslim community takes root here in the Justice Department where we are committed to using criminal and civil rights laws to protect Muslim Americans. A top priority of this Justice Department is a return to robust civil rights enforcement and outreach in defending religious freedoms and other fundamental rights of all of our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the housing market, in our schools and in the voting booth.

I don't know whether the Black Panthers ever delayed implementation of a provision in a health care law, but it's hard to imagine where they would have gotten the opportunity.

All in all, I have to conclude I don't know what Tantaros is talking about. I mean, what could Eric Holder possibly have in common with a bunch of Black Pa—

Oh, right. That. But I can't believe a Fox News Host would suggest somebody is a bad attorney general just because he's black. I mean that would be, um, racist, right?

Bronze dog whistle by Michael Mueller.