The most sane thing I have read about the DOJ Black Panther Case yet

It comes from none other than Rick Moran over at Right Wing NutHouse:

I don’t for a minute believe Holder and Obama are racists. I believe they are politically correct jackasses who sought to bestow a political gift on a favored constituency. For those – including Boehlert – who believe that this issue was small potatoes, perhaps they might explain the furious activity surrounding it from both the White House and the Department of Justice. This timeline of White House involvement and NAACP lobbying on behalf of the Panthers pretty much destroys the idea that there was a legitimate reason to drop the civil suit. It was politics, pure and simple. And having spent the 2008 campaign rightly railing against the politicization of the Bush justice department, Obama and Holder could hardly be expected to admit to doing the same.

This doesn’t excuse Limbaugh or Beck from making their jaw dropping claims about Obama sticking it to white people or that the president is trying to foment a race war. But are those comments ignorant, stupid, irrational, and paranoid? Or are they racist?

You simply can’t automatically identify political speech you disagree with as racist like Boehlert does in his ridiculously exaggerated screed. Of course it’s bonkers to believe that Obama wants a race war, or that he’s out for payback against whites for slavery. But why is that necessarily a racist comment? What makes it racist, specifically? If it were racist based on the fact that it’s nutty and dead wrong, that encompasses a lot of territory. And ascribing racist attitudes based solely on the fact that the president is black just doesn’t cut it unless you want to drastically demean and lower the bar for what constitutes racism in political speech. Using that formula, all opposition speech against the president should be dismissed as racist – an outcome no doubt devoutly wished for by Obama partisans but nonsense on its face.

Go read the rest… It is very good.