A Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is calling charges that the Justice Department ignores the civil rights of whites ridiculous.

Abigail Thernstrom, Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said allegations that the Obama Administration failed to prosecute a voter intimidation case, involving the New Black Panther Party, have no merit:

"We have no direct evidence that [the NBP activists] actually intimidated anybody, stopped them from voting," Thernstrom said on CBS' Face the Nation. In an earlier column, she called the case "small potatoes."

"I think the evidence is extremely weak," Thernstrom said. "If the Justice Department chooses - and I would be delighted if it did so - to send to us, for instance, somebody who is at that alleged brown bag meeting in which [Deputy Assistant Attorney General] Julie Fernandez said, 'We don't prosecute cases [against] blacks ...' fine. I'm an evidence girl, really. I want evidence."

It's what most people with common sense said after hearing the facts surrounding the case. The first warning sign that this entire case is questionable is that it is being pushed by former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams, who is now a conservative Republican activist. One New York Post columnist called him a "Republican activist posing as a whistleblower."



No voters in the predominately black voting district had been prevented from voting, civil charges were brought against one New Black Panther Party member and it was the Bush administration, not the Obama administration, who decided not to pursue criminal charges.

A MediaMatters investigation found that "Adams is a right-wing activist tied to the Bush-era politicization of the Justice Department who has admitted he lacks first-hand knowledge of the events he is discussing, and his claims fall apart given the fact that the Obama DOJ obtained judgment against one defendant, while the Bush DOJ declined to pursue similar allegations in 2006."

Instead, this case is the part of a larger trend of the far Right using pseudo-racist episodes as political fodder to inspire paranoia. Using the demographic changes in our country and the election of the first black president, the far right is making a concerted effort to scare white people in to believing they are or will be the victims of racism.

The case of Shirley Sherrod is the most recent example, with media outlets like Fox News helping to spread the story line.

"The Obama administration has been intimidated by the far-right wing, which is addicted to a kind of paranoia of race that then leads to paralyzing racial conversation," Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, said on Face the Nation.

Instead of the election of the first black president opening up an honest conversation about race in this country, we seem to be sliding backward with more fear and untruths than ever before.

What do you think?